The Validity of 
American Ideals 



By 

SHAILER MATHEWS 

Dean of the Divinity School, the University of Chicago 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



fizz 






Copyright, 1922, by 
SHAILER MATHEWS 



Printed in the United States of America 



CONTENTS 

Paob 

Introduction 7 

Preface 9 

Lecture 

I. The Test of Ideals 13 

II. The Free Individual 42 

III. Democracy 93 

IV. The Written Constitution 123 

V. Cooperative Sovereignty 150 

VI. Americanism as an Ideal 176 



INTRODUCTION 

George Slocum Bennett^ a graduate of 
Wesleyan University in the class of 1864, 
showed his hfelong interest in the training 
of youth for the privileges and duties of 
citizenship by long periods of service as a 
member of the Board of Education of his 
home city, and as member of the boards of 
trustees of Wyoming Seminary and Wes- 
leyan University. 

It was fitting, therefore, that, when the 
gifts made by himself and family to Wes- 
leyan University were combined to form a 
fund whose income should be used "in de- 
fraying the expenses of providing for visit- 
ing lecturers, preachers, and other speakers 
supplemental to the college faculty," it 
should have been decided that the primary 
purpose should be to provide each year a 
course of lectures, by a distinguished 
speaker, "for the promotion of a better un- 
derstanding of national problems and of a 
more perfect realization of the responsibili- 
ties of citizenship," and to provide for the 
publication of such lectures so that they 

7 



8 INTRODUCTION 

might reach a larger public than the audi- 
ence to which they should, in the first in- 
stance, be addressed. 

To give the third course of lectures on this 
Foundation, the joint committee for its ad- 
ministration appointed by the board of trus- 
tees and by the faculty, selected Shailer 
Mathews, Dean of the Divinity School in the 
University of Chicago. The varied and bril- 
liant career of this teacher, administrator, 
editor, author, and lecturer, has brought him 
into contact with the people of almost every 
part of this country. His extensive studies 
in the fields of religion, history, economics, 
and sociology have peculiarly fitted him for 
the task of correlating and interpreting his 
impressions of American life and character 
in such a way as to bring out the real signifi- 
cance of those national ideals which have 
become a part of the American tradition, 
and in which we are accustomed to find the 
justification for our type of democracy. 

William Arnold Shanklin. 

David George Downey. 

Albert Wheeler Johnston. 

Henry Merritt Wriston. 

Frank Edgar Farley. 



PREFACE 

Any brief discussion of the history and 
significance of America is exposed to the 
danger of falling into theoretical criticism 
or nebulous generalization. I am not sure 
that I have escaped either danger. The 
validity of American ideals deserves a much 
fuller treatment than these lectures permit. 

Yet I feel that an understanding of the 
constructive ideals of our nation is indispen- 
sable to an intelHgent citizenship. Espe- 
cially in an age like ours, which is suffering 
from the chaotic conditions that have always 
followed great wars, is there need to see 
American Hfe in its perspective and to real- 
ize its inner spiritual forces. 

There is no lack of men who are eager to 
point out the shortcomings of America. 
There are all too many who can see in our 
social order only an opportunity for arousing 
the spirit of conflict which a war demands for 
its success. But the psychology of peace is 
radically different from that of war. While 
we are fighting even for the noblest ideals 
our unity must rest largely upon a common 
enmity. But in times of peace we must aban- 

9 



10 PREFACE 

don hatred as a basis of social unity unless 
we can perform the almost miraculous feat 
of making it serve as a basis of united as- 
sault upon social injustice and other evils 
which are a part of our human lot. 

A nation in peace has seldom been able to 
utilize the attitudes developed in war. Even 
the common hatred which has united us in 
the face of an enemy becomes a source of in- 
ternal misunderstandings and conflicts. 
Now that we have ceased to fight, we must 
learn to cooperate. The position of our na- 
tion as the final arbiter in the great war is 
being duplicated in the more difficult field of 
the reestablishment of civihzation and the 
making of a better world. The problem of 
the citizen is more complicated and difficult 
than that of a soldier. 

In these lectures I have tried to help the 
generation that bore the brunt of the war to 
take up the course of development inter- 
rupted by that great tragedy. If, despite 
the obvious insufficiency of presentation, I 
have in any way succeeded in my effort, I 
shall feel that I have to some degree fulfilled 
the purposes of the founders of the lecture- 
ship under whose auspices I spoke. 



WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 



GEORGE SLOCUM BENNETT FOUNDATION 



LECTURES 



For the Promotion of a Better Un- 
derstanding of National Problems 
and of a More Perfect Realization 
of the Responsibilities of Citizenship. 



THIRD SERIES— 1920-21 



LECTURE I 

THE TEST OF IDEALS 

An ideal is a working hypothesis of better- 
ment. Its validity is a question of morals, 
to be established by its ability to draw men 
toward itself. In morals abstract tests are 
worthless. An ideal with only theoretical 
beauty is a bit of social algebra. We are all 
tempted to drift off into such algebra when- 
ever we discuss social affairs. Accustomed 
as we are in mathematics to arrive at exact 
proof by the elimination of concrete real- 
ities, we almost instinctively adopt the same 
method in dealing with human affairs. But 
even in algebra a formula is true only accord- 
ing to what its letters represent. We say 
complacently x-\- y = z. But if ^r = a Bol- 
shevist and y = 2i capitahst, how shall we 
describe s? Similarly in the discussion of 
social ideals. Innumerable discussions make 
the word "democracy" a sort of intellectual 
X which can be thrown into various combi- 
nations, each like itself a disembodied reality. 
We forget that a society is really composed 
13 



14 THE VALIDITY OF 

of folks with their passions and prejudices 
and ambitions. The vahdity of an ideal un- 
der such conditions cannot be determined 
until we consider the actual forces which 
gave it birth and with which it is concerned. 
An ideal in one society might be reaction in 
another. 

Failure to realize this commonpladF truth 
lies beneath much of the discontent of well- 
meaning persons who cannot understand 
why their description of an ideal is so far out 
of line with actual affairs. A radical in- 
variably neglects the human element. He 
wants things done immediately. He is im- 
patient with process. Once having con- 
vinced himself that a proposal is good in it- 
self he wants everybody to adopt it at once. 
Yet to urge ideals while oblivious to folks 
and folk-ways may be as fatal as it would be 
to give water in unUmited quantities to a 
man dying from thirst. 

The vahdity of an ideal can be judged by 
two standards — its origin and its effects. 
Negatively such judgment is easy. If it 
springs from socially repudiated motives, 
reaction, and willful disregard of contem- 
porary human rights ; if it is so inappKcable 



AMERICAN IDEALS 15 

to a given social order as to produce social 
anarchy, selfishness, and disregard of per- 
sonal rights, an ideal is invalid. Such origins 
we often find proposed as the justification 
of the actions of privileged classes in periods 
of reaction Uke that of the post-Napoleonic 
era, and as the support of demagogues and 
terrorists in almost every revolution. Posi- 
tively, however, valuation of an ideal is not 
so easy. Yet if an ideal originates in de- 
sires to improve the best conditions known 
to its champions, in forward-reaching reh- 
gions and governments, in intelligence and 
strong personalities ; if with full recognition 
of the achievements and actual possibilities 
of conditions to which it is applied, it makes 
toward wider opportunity for giving as well 
as getting justice, and is capable of effective 
embodiment in social institutions, it certainly 
has every reason for being judged valid. 
And unless social conditions have radically 
changed, its efficiency in the past warrants 
hope for its validity in the future. 

All this is particularly true when we speak 
about national ideals. It is not uncommon 
to find political philosophers and literary re- 
formers setting forth contrasting pictures 



16 THE VALIDITY OF 

of America as it is and as it ought to be. 
Having organized an ideal in disregard of 
the citizens who must express it, they at once 
grow discouraged because they see such a 
difference between it and the reahties of 
American hfe. A very considerable litera- 
ture of this sort is at your disposal. But you 
cannot judge a nation so easily. Our poets, 
our philosophers, our statesmen, may in- 
terpret our national life as expressing cer- 
tain ideals but such interpretations are by no 
means infallible. Recall, for example, the 
interpretation given America by De 
Tocqueville. The real ideals of America 
are immanent within its historical tenden- 
cies. Their value is pragmatically to be 
known in the effects of the process of na- 
tional growth. I 

There are, of course, abstract and phil- 
osophical considerations with which we may 
properly estimate the validity of American 
ideals, but they are only secondary. They do 
not furnish the ideals. They must not be 
searched for them any more than you would 
search More's Utopia for the pohcy of j 
Lloyd George. The only ideals with ' 
which we are now concerned are those 



AMERICAN IDEALS 17 

which are found by a study of Amer- 
ican history and its tendencies. Having 
found them, we shall have simultaneously 
discovered their vahdity, for they were in the 
social minds which have made America. The 
only serious question remaining will be not 
whether they can be justified by abstract 
ethical considerations, but whether condi- 
tions have so changed that the ideals which 
have been a part of our history can have 
equal influence in the future. 

I do not pretend in these lectures to take 
a neutral attitude. In an exclusively histori- 
cal study neutrality is imperative, but when 
it comes to a valuation of one's own nation 
one has a right to be swayed by the history he 
studies. For my part, I do not dissemble 
pride in America despite its faults. Six 
years ago I found myself before audiences in 
Japan endeavoring to set forth the real 
meaning of American history. The haze of 
the Pacific is distorting not only when one 
looks from the West, but when one looks 
from the East. There were few things, I 
found, of which we suspected the Japanese, 
of which the Japanese did not suspect us. It 
was an altogether new experience. In justi- 



18 THE VALIDITY OF 

fication of our own attitudes I was led to 
plead our international relations. Without 
boasting I found it possible to say things of 
the United States which no other nation 
could say of itself. Every fair-minded critic 
of our country must see them. When with 
wider study I have tried to see the meaning 
of developments in the United States this 
patriotic conviction has been deepened. I 
realize that we have glaring faults. I have 
too many friends in other countries and I 
have read too many discussions of America 
to be left in ignorance in this regard. I am 
ready to admit that we dishke to catalogue 
these faults, preferring to give at least a 
conventional respectability to questionable 
men and deeds — as an old family not so far 
from Middletown still marks the empty 
grave of one of its members, "Lost at sea," 
although he really was rescued, but failed 
to report at home, married a new wife, and 
estabhshed a new family in distant New 
Hampshire! But the history of America 
is the history of cautious pioneering in so- 
cial and political idealism. The American 
patriot as he pleads for his nation does not 
need to be a chauvinist or an apologist; he 



AMERICAN IDEALS 19 

needs simply to tell the story of our develop- 
ment. 

American history is more than the history 
of people in America. The annals of a na- 
tion may be of value as facts, but they may 
also be quite valueless. Supposing that 
some one should discover the full record of 
the life of an Esquimau tribe, who ex- 
cept anthropologists, would be interested? 
A nation to have a really significant history 
must have contributed something significant 
to social evolution. Other nations must have 
benefited by its experience. Other peoples 
must have been taught by it to avoid mis- 
takes. Humanity must have found within 
its political and social experiments material 
for its betterment. True, there are peoples 
whose history we must study for other and 
more sinister reasons. There have been pi- 
rate nations who have left a wake of blood 
across history; contagiously decadent na- 
tions who have been the breeding spot of 
moral weakness and death; vast undeveloped 
but isolated peoples whose wild awakening 
may ruin civilization. But America belongs 
to none of these classes. Its history is a part 
of the world history. It has made its con- 



20 THE VALIDITY OF 

tribution to the forces which have trans- 
formed human life. It has never been a pi- 
rate nation ; and if only it remains true to its 
ideals, it will never be a decadent or an an- 
archic nation. 



Yet we must face our moral liabilities if 
only to assure ourselves that our problem 
is not merely rhetorical. 

This is a bad day for idealists. During the 
Great War we were told that all things were 
to be made new. It was a rare virtue that 
was not to find itself embodied in the world 
after the war. Our young men were to come 
back and remake the church, the state, the 
family, and even ourselves. Those of us who 
knew something about history and the effect 
of past wars upon human society indulged 
in no such millennial dreams. It is as diffi- 
cult to make a historian enthusiastic as it is 
to make an old man hopeful. He knows too 
much about human life and its ever-recur- 
ring cycles. 

But historians were comparatively few, 
and we were all desperately engaged in help- 
ing carry forward a struggle for the very life 



AMERICAN IDEALS 21 

of existing society. Our hopes were nour- 
ished by oratory, sacred and profane, and the 
struggle of the day was regarded as a proph- 
ecy of the coming day. When the armistice 
came and the war closed, our optimists looked 
about for justification of their faith. Their 
search brought disappointment and lamen- 
tation. Army life had left the young men 
of America about where it found them. The 
church had found no uplift, industry no 
brotherhood, politics no new vision. An 
orgy of spending and a frenzied determina- 
tion to enjoy oneself and forget the war 
deadened our consciences. No wonder dis- 
illusioned idealists grew cynical ! 

It is not difficult, you see, to point out con- 
ditions which very properly bid us pause in 
easy-going belief that ideahsm is regnant in 
America. But we have much farther to go 
before pessimism is exhausted. In 1916 the 
prevailing voice of the American people was 
for some sort of participation in a League of 
Nations. In 1920 we heard a general revival 
of the plans for isolation and the demand 
that America be prepared to defend herself 
against a world with which she has not under- 
taken to cooperate. 



22 THE VALIDITY OF 

It may be argued that the war has left us 
with a great loyalty to the flag and a keen 
sensitiveness to our national honor. Our 
critics admit that such is the case, but aver 
that it is a long way from national honor to 
national ideals. They point out that at the 
very time when this nationalism has been de- 
veloping there has been an exodus of intelU- 
gent foreigners from America back to their 
homes. In a recent number of the Atlantic 
a writer reports that he questioned two hun- 
dred Norwegians who were on board a 
steamer saiKng to Norway and found that 
only about ten per cent ever expected to re- 
turn to America. Inquiry brought the al- 
most universal reply that America was all 
right "except for the people that run it," 
and that these returning emigrants, many of 
whom were naturalized Americans, had had 
enough of America. My own opinion is that 
such disillusioned folk will soon be seeking 
return passage — for there is nothing so 
deadly to an immigrant's homesickness as a 
visit to his homeland ! But none the less this 
disaffection must be counted among our U- 
abilities. 
More serious are doubts as to what we have 



AMERICAN IDEALS 23 

been taught to regard as our chief idealistic 
heritage. You will find in many colleges 
those "young intellectuals" who insist that 
American democracy is based upon an out- 
grown philosophy and is to be renounced as 
mid- Victorian. Individualism, nationaUsm, 
and the refusal to plunge altruistically into 
the maelstrom of Irish independence and in- 
ternational socialism, not to say Bolshevism, 
are held by such intellectuals as evidence of 
hopelessly bourgeois minds. As for indi- 
vidualism, there are indeed few among the 
intellectuals who would say a word in its 
favor. In their eyes it has disappeared be- 
yond the iridescent haze of class conscious- 
ness, never to reappear — except when some 
class-conscious person undertakes to cooper- 
ate with some other class-conscious person! 
Then it is that the original stuff of which 
humanity is made reasserts itself, for, para- 
doxical as it may seem, some of the most in- 
dividuahstic persons alive are those who 
plead most convincingly for social solidarity. 
Back of much of this criticism is sup- 
pressed jealousy expressing itself in rhe- 
torical dreams. A friend of mine went to 
Russia just after the first revolution. As he 



24 THE VALIDITY OF 

came to the frontier he stepped up to the 
guard and extended to him his fehcitations 
for the success of the revolution by which 
the Czar had been deposed. He happened 
to have with him a picture of George Wash- 
ington, and he showed it to the guard. The 
Russian looked at it indifferently, without 
any of the admiration which my friend had 
supposed one republican should show to the 
father of republics. But all the soldier re- 
marked was, "He looks like a comfortable 
gentleman." The full meaning of this retort 
appeared later in Petrograd when my friend 
asked a cab driver what he meant by a bour- 
geois person. He rephed, "Someone who 
was comfortable under the old regime." 
Parlor socialists and revolutionary intellect- 
uals with an income may well give serious 
thought to that answer of a man who was 
not a dilettante revolutionist! 

There is in America a growing number of 
people who hate those who have been com- 
fortable and those conditions which have 
made for their comfort. They respond no 
more than would the Russian soldier to the 
praise of our democracy. They believe our 
democracy is only another term for a capital- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 25 

istic social order. They will have none of it. 
They believe in socialism and communism. 
And they are consistent. There is a very 
great difference between what we call democ- 
racy and their ideals. The bitterest denun- 
ciation of the United States we have heard 
lately has come from men of this sort. Kings 
have disappeared, but American democracy 
has new enemies in men and women who be- 
lieve it is outgrown. 

Even among those who are not champions 
of class-consciousness there is the suspicion 
that our institutions, however successful in 
the past, are incompetent to direct the prog- 
ress of the future. Such suspicion is some- 
times not frankly expressed, but even among 
some good Americans sincerely devoted to 
forwarding human interests and welfare, 
there is a frank avowal of doubt as to the ca- 
pacity of American institutions to serve what 
they regard as democracy. Nor is it difficult 
for such critics to point out the basis of their 
apprehensions. American life is confessedly 
by no means perfect and the tension born of 
the interplay of economic groups in a vast 
population scattered over an immense area 
certainly grows no less. The enthusiasm for 



26 THE VALIDITY OF 

liberty in the eighteenth-century sense of the 
word has certainly waned, and the idea that 
the best government is one which interferes 
least with the individual citizen has been re- 
placed by a prompt recourse to govern- 
mental activity whenever crises emerge. Po- 
litical forms which were effective in a 
sparsely settled country and a nonindustrial 
civilization are said to be breaking down 
under our present conditions. Such critics 
of America do not despair of their country, 
but they swell the number of those who en- 
tertain the hope of a radical change from a 
representative government chosen by indi- 
viduals to one of universal referendum. 

Nor are political and economic conditions 
the sole object of attack. With the distrust 
of democracy as a system of government, 
goes a distrust of nearly everything that be- 
longs to control set up by the past. Good- 
ness is said to be a form of sham morality. 
Marriage, religion, law, all alike are treated 
by one or more groups of the "disillusioned" 
as debilitating survivals which are outgrown. 
If you venture a defense of experienced 
idealism, the response of these antidemocrats 
is apt to be increased vociferation, the shrug 



AMERICAN IDEALS 27 

of superior shoulders, and the charge that 
you are bourgeois and mid- Victorian. With 
the radical there is no more awful anathema! 

II 

Are these strictures upon American life 
and its ideals legitimate? Are the ideals 
which have characterized the past of Amer- 
ica's national hfe still valid? Are we to 
stand in terror of to-morrow because we have 
outgrown the virtues of yesterday ? Are our 
newly naturalized citizens capable intel- 
lectually of appropriating these ideals of the 
fathers? Have they experiences in which 
Americanism can root itself? It is to such 
questions as these that I would direct your 
attention. It may be that to some of you 
they may seem as academic as they did to me 
when first I heard them raised years ago, 
but no such opinion can be held by those who 
really study the tendencies in to-day's na- 
tional life. Questions like these cannot be 
drowned in jazz music. America at the 
present time is passing through a crisis in 
morality which cannot be met wisely or ef- 
fectively if a generation indifferently turns 
from idealistic ends, measures everything in 



28 THE VALIDITY OF 

terms of money, and substitutes amusement 
for self-control. 

Nor am I thinking only of the foreign- 
born among us. We who constitute the pa- 
rental generation may very likely be too con- 
cerned about the ways of young people who 
are to follow us upon the stage of American 
history, but we cannot overlook the fact that 
our own youth was spent under conditions 
our parents could understand. We may 
have been wayward, but we were wayward 
within the hmits of American conventions 
and political thinking. Parents and children 
had a history in common and spoke the same 
political language. We never questioned 
America. But is this as true to-day as it 
was a generation ago? Successive waves of 
continental immigration diluted our patri- 
otic inheritance and unsettled our national 
habits, and unless one's observation is quite 
misleading, we need to educate the rising 
generation as well as immigrants in the gen- 
uine ideals of their country. We cannot 
suffer them to assume that one sort of social 
idealism is as good as another. 

We all need to be Americanized; we all 
need to guard against being continentalized. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 29 

The continent of Europe never has had the 
same pohtical or social history, experience 
or ideals as England and America. The 
two divisions of European life have always 
found it hard to understand, much less ap- 
preciate, one another. Not merely political 
and economic rivalry but a different social 
structure and process have kept them apart. 
To-day these two ancient opponents are ac- 
tually intermingled in America. Their op- 
position continues. Continental pohtical 
and social ideals have been and are being 
frankly heralded as superior to those devel- 
oped in America. To an extent all but star- 
tling the war found American education 
filled with this distrust of American institu- 
tions and constructive hopes. The validity 
of our ideals must now be defended not only 
conventionally but aggressively before the 
bar of a generation of Americans who have 
been subjected to the influences of German 
and Russian class-idealism. The difficulty 
of one generation's being understood by its 
successor lends poignancy to one's efforts 
to share with young men and women our con- 
fidence in the outlook for a genuine America. 
Having had no share in the production of 



30 THE VALIDITY OF 

the American nation, taking their good for- 
tunes as a matter of course, the patriotism of 
too many students has been darkened by the 
criticisms of those who at heart are cham- 
pions of ideals, institutions, and a social or- 
ganization developed in a different social 
order. Let us grant, if we must, that there 
are misunderstandings between the genera- 
tion that caused the war and the generation 
that won the war ; but let us not concede that 
American ideals are any less valuable be- 
cause men died for them. Once recognized, 
they will make their own way; once under- 
stood, they become the common divisor of 
generations. And there is no better way to 
make loyal Americans than to evoke spirit- 
ual unity through an understanding of 
American ideals embodied in American his- 
tory and institutions. If we cannot "sell" 
American ideals to the new millions in 
America, we cannot hope to propagate them 
by force. If our ideals are not valid, the Re- 
public is indeed in danger. Revolution is 
the invariable answer of one idealism to an- 
other that stubbornly persists after its in- 
stitutions have become the privileges of its 
champions. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 31 

III 

We have said that the vahdity of an ideal 
must be judged first by reference to its ori- 
gin. How shall this test apply to our own 
ideals? Did they spring from materialistic 
ambition, from a longing for power? Or 
did they spring from the noblest experience 
of their time? Are they children of pride 
and comfort or of spirituality? Have the 
dominants in their pedigree been those of 
conquerors or of martyrs? The answer is 
one of facts. And facts are eloquent. The 
social movements which gave birth to our 
ideals were the noblest of their day. 
^ To appreciate the origin of American 
ideals one must recall that they are not sim- 
ply those which can be found in America. 
Time would fail if we were to catalogue 
ideals proposed and propagated on our con- 
tinent. Many of them are fantastic, some 
of them are foolish, a few of them are dan- 
gerous. Some of them are the more or less 
illegitimate and sterile progeny of genuine 
American stock. But original American 
ideals are developments of English experi- 
ence and morals. In their earhest forms 



32 THE VALIDITY OF 

they immigrated hither and grew up with 
the country. 

It is sometimes said that the ideahsm of 
the American Constitution was derived from 
French philosophy. The opposite is more 
nearly true. French philosophy was born 
of English political and social experience. 
The French Revolution was inspired by the 
American Revolution. The rights of men 
were derived from the rights of Congrega- 
tionalists and frontiersmen. They are the 
children of history, christened and registered 
by philosophy. 

Anglo-Saxon idealism of the seventeenth 
century is the parent of American ideals. 
This historical fact is of first importance. 
German idealism is sentimental and singu- 
larly divorced from political and social in- 
stitutions. French idealism becomes a pyro- 
technic enthusiasm giving rise to a program 
like that of Napoleon or a defense like that 
of Verdun. But Anglo-American idealism 
is neither sentimental nor a matter of en- 
thusiasm. It is matter-of-fact — the product 
of social practice, often born of tragic con- 
flict with privileges men have sought to fas- 
ten upon progress. Such restraint has al- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 33 

ways failed. Just as the rights of Enghsh- 
men long ago became the rights of foreign- 
ers in England, so have the rights of Eng- 
lishmen in America become generahzed into 
rights which everybody ought to have — the 
rights of man. 

Of course, our national history has 
abounded in impossible promises as to what 
would come to pass if some party or other 
should win at an election. But such irides- 
cent promises have never been taken very 
seriously by a sophisticated electorate. A 
poUtical platform is not a program. It is 
rather something upon which a candidate 
may stand while he is deciding which way the 
people at large choose to go. This fact saves 
even the sometimes Munchausenlike opti- 
mism of our platforms from hypocrisy. For 
the hope of to-day if only it is born of justice 
has been the forecast of the reality of day 
after to-morrow. The people have been re- 
lentless arbiters. Selfishness and quackery 
have been sensed and discarded as an un- 
worthy ancestry for sane hopes. 

We have had every now and then 
dream-pictures of a better world which 
was to come when certain theories and 



34 THE VALIDITY OF 

dreams had been realized. But they have 
not long endured. They did not spring 
from the common struggle for justice and 
betterment. As the path of the explorer is 
strewn with impedimenta abandoned be- 
cause found unusable, is the history of Amer- 
ica strewn with cast-off ideals which have had 
momentary attention but have never se- 
riously been put into life. Their origin has 
been in speculation rather than in group- 
morality born of experience. 

The validity of American ideals, I repeat, 
can be established first of all by the fact that 
they are the legitimate children of Anglo- 
Saxon history as it has preserved and ex- 
tended human rights, both social and indi- 
vidual. They are ours because their devel- 
opment has both determined and been deter- 
mined by the direction in which our history 
has proceeded. Springing from practical 
idealism they have made greater idealism 
practical. Not, of course, that all our his- 
tory is ideahstic, but this at least is true : if 
you sight across the two centuries or more 
during which America has actually been in 
the process of organization, you can discover 
that despite variations in pace, despite strug- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 35 

gles and even civil war, there are certain out- 
standing tendencies toward larger personal 
values in our national life. It is they which 
give character to American history. They 
are not superimposed upon American life. 
They did not, full-grown, antedate Amer- 
ican institutions in the sense that they were 
simply appropriated by America as Japan 
has appropriated western culture. They are 
developed expressions of germinant hopes 
and faiths that gave our history inner self- 
direction. They were born not of dreams 
but of experience. They are the outgrowth 
not of self complacency, but of the highest 
spiritual loyalties, joined with experience in 
making the good of to-morrow spring from 
the best of to-day. 

In the second place, our ideals are vahd 
because they sprang from the practical ex- 
perience of religious groups seeking political 
liberty. 

I make no apology for such a recognition 
of the worth of rehgion. If one puts one's 
self at the beginning of our American his- 
tory, say about 1600, he will see plainly that 
among the germinal forces which went to 
produce our modern world was the rise of 



36 THE VALIDITY OF 

religious liberty. I am aware that an effort 
is now being made to minimize the impor- 
tance of this religious element in our origins 
in favor of an emphasis upon economic life. 
And certainly economic motives were not 
strangers to the men who organized the Vir- 
ginia Company and its fellows. Far be it 
from the historian to undervalue the role 
which codfish and fur-bearing animals, to- 
bacco and pines played in the seventeenth 
century. The Pilgrims and the Puritans, 
as truly as the Frenchmen, were not above 
such unspiritual goods. But to think of the 
colonists of New England as primarily or 1 
predominantly exploiters of virgin resources 
is to confuse the Adventurers who stayed at | 
home and waited for their ships to come in, 
with those strong souls who undertook to 
found new states where they might follow 
their conscience and worship their God, as 
well as make their living. It is true that 
these pioneers may have been embryo cap- 
italists, but their institutions and ideals were 
more than those of money makers. Any at- 
tempt to separate economic, political and re- 
ligious forces in the history of colonial Amer- 
ica will lead to misinterpretation of facts. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 37 

Historically the American colonies are the 
children of economic distress, political unrest 
and Protestantism. Not one of them, with 
the exception of Maryland, is the product of 
any other phase of life. Each of the thirteen 
colonies had its independent history, but 
their pre-national life was rooted in the 
search of religious minorities to find scope 
and liberty for the exercise of their rehgious 
principles. In this American colonies par- 
took of the general character of Protestant- 
ism as something more than a religious move- 
ment. The great activity of the sixteenth 
century can only be described as a social 
revolution. In the new states which, follow- 
ing the decline of feudahsm, were formed 
throughout Europe, the rise of cities and 
monarchies, the new learning, the discovery 
of new national wealth with the consequent 
dislocation of prices were all as truly impor- 
tant as were those religious motives to which 
the student of the Reformation so generally 
gives his attention. Protestantism in the 
sense of anti-Cathohcism was a religious 
phase of a great social and political move- 
ment. It was not originally interested in 
abstract liberty or in granting concrete lib- 



38 THE VALIDITY OF 

erties to others. Its niiiid was set on self- 
deteniiination, aiid the right of each political 
unit to establish its own national or muni- 
cipal church. Just as in the social and po- 
ll ticvol revolution which we call the Reforma- 
tion there emerged a group of independent 
monarchies and sovereign states, did there 
emerge also the national churches. Democ- 
racy wa5 either undreamed or perverted into 
fanaticism. Xone of the great reformers 
seem ever to have questioned the right of the 
state to fix orthodoxy. There was hardly 
more hberty for non-conformists in the sev- 
enteenth century than there was for the 
Arians in the fourth century. 

In this simple fact hes the explanation of 
much of the development of the seventeenth 
century. For, as in their search for seK- 
determi nation, the national churches spht off 
from the imperial Church of Rome, various 
groups of Independents spht off from the 
national churches. With few exceptions, the 
colonies were largely organized by such peo- 
ple. They sought rehgious hberty and 
wished to escape state churches. In particu- 
lar the northern American ct)lonie5 were the 
product of a new spirit in England which re- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 39 

fused to conform to the established church 
whether that was Episcopal or Presbyterian. 
The English colonies of the north and many 
of the French and German colonies further 
south were founded by groups who had been 
oppressed and who were here in search of 
hberty. Similarly in the eighteenth century 
the large migration of the Presb}i;erians 
from the north of Ireland was a search for 
hberty as well as a new home. The impor- 
tance of the Irish Presbyterians in the Revo- 
lutionary War can hardly be overestimated. 
They made victory possible. 

But the idea of rehgious hberty as such 
was not transferred. There was no rehgious 
hberty to be transferred. It had to be 
evolved. "When the Stuarts fell the migra- 
tion of Puritans to Massachusetts Bay all 
but ceased. The rehgious hberty at home 
made the transatlantic liberty unalluring. 
With the possible exception of httle Plym- 
outh and the first settlement in Maryland, 
not one of the original colonies had at the 
start any idea of rehgious hbertj^ in the ab- 
stract. Religious libertj^ was born of the 
exigency of the situation, in which various 
self -determining groups found themselves 



40 THE VALIDITY OF 

unable to exclude dissenters from citizenship. 
The history of early New England was a 
short-hved epitome of the history of contem- 
porary England. Rhode Island, the first 
colony in which complete rehgious hberty 
was set forth, was the small child of a pro- 
testing minority of Massachusetts. But un- 
planned and it may be undesired, religious 
hberty came out from the rehgious hfe of 
America; and hberty in one aspect of social 
life is bound to affect all phases. Faith in a 
Sovereign God in heaven and on earth gov- 
ernment through town-meetings lie behind 
American hberties of all sorts. But the be- 
lief in a Sovereign God was first. A theoc- 
racy became a repubhc because a theocracy 
was found to be impracticable. 

This rehgious parentage, this birth from 
the very highest range of ideals which Euro- 
pean hfe had reached, is one guaranty of the 
validity of our fundamental American ideal 
— the world of the free individual. Far more 
than even Switzerland or Holland did the 
Anglo-American colonies contribute to the 
world this ideal of self-government born of 
rehgion, nourished in the church and des- 
tined to evangehze pohtical experience. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 41 

IV 

The other test of the vahdity of ideals is 
pragmatic, the testimony of history itself. 
American ideals were not thought out. They 
were lived out. They sprang from hopes 
and were constantly given opportunity for 
practical testing. They are improvements 
on experience suggested by experience. If 
one looks at the history of these hopes as a 
phase of our national experience, you can 
see that they involve four fundamental 
ideals. First, a society composed of free and 
equal individuals; second, democracy as an 
actual way of free individuals living together 
in equaUty and in peace ; third, a written con- 
stitution embodying the principles of such 
democracy; fourth, cooperative sovereignty. 
We shall now estimate their validity by ex- 
amining their evolution and their effect. 



42 THE VALIDITY OF 

LECTURE II 
THE FREE INDIVIDUAL 

"If I had to be born again, as 1 was born, 
of a family that had no influence worth any- 
thing, no money, no lineage — if I had to 
make my way again, as I had to, against dif- 
ficulties such that at the age of twenty-five 
all that I possessed was a hundred dollars of 
debts — well, in spite of all temptations to 
belong to other nations', I should have felt 
that there was only one place for a young 
man who wanted to tear from life full value 
for his efforts ; in spite of all temptations I 
should have been born an American." So 
says W. L. George, an Englishman. 

Some time ago I asked a man who has won 
distinction in his chosen field of hfe, what in 
his opinion was the basis of his patriotism. 
He immediately replied: "Appreciation for 
a country that could permit me, a poor boy, 
to realize some of the ambitions of life." 
Such an answer could be made by thousands 
and milhons of Americans. Mary Antin 
has made it with a beauty and passion which 



AMERICAISr IDEALS 43 

almost shame our more critical self -estimate. 
Edward Bok has made it in his interesting 
autobiography, The Americanization of Ed- 
ward Bok, All such answers express the 
fundamental American ideal, namely, the 
free individual and his right to enjoy such 
opportunities and to meet such social obh- 
gations as he may face. Until 1917 it was 
not unconmion to see men smile over the 
eighteenth-century ideal that '"all men are 
created free and equal." It availed nothing 
to show them that Jefferson was a man alto- 
gether too well versed in human nature to 
mean by equality identity of capacity, or that 
he would have been the last man to say if 
men are brothers they are therefore twins. 
The Great War brought us a better under- 
standing of the meaning of liberty and of 
person. Even the prostitution of "personal 
liberty" to a meaning little more than man's 
right to get drunk when he pleases and of a 
theatrical manager to put on actors and ac- 
tresses with as little clothing as he pleases, 
has not destroyed the new pride with which 
we read the great sentence of the Declaration 
of Independence. For the United States 
has been a land of opportunity for the indi- 



44 THE VALIDITY OF 

vidual. It has developed individualism, and 
individualism rather than social classes is its 
fundamental ideal. Its goal is the welfare 
of the individual and not of any social class. 
I do not need to remind you that the va- 
lidity of this ideal, above all others, has been 
questioned. Especially have we been assured 
by Socialists and semi- Socialists that society 
is the supreme end to which we all must yield, 
that individuahsm means competition and 
competition means capitalism and capitalism 
means wage-slavery. And, in truth, if such 
an indictment of individualism were correct, 
we might well feel that our country was mis- 
taken in making it central among its driving 
motives. But the vahdity of the ideal is not 
to be judged by a priori assumptions but by 
the general course of the history within which 
it has operated. Yet a priori tests are 
not lacking. There can be no question that 
either an individual is worth something or 
life is worth nothing. To think that value- 
less individuals can combine to make an in- 
valuable society is a good deal hke saying 
that one can make a million by adding ci- 
phers. The only thing which makes society 
worth anything is that it conduces to the 



AMERICAN IDEALS 45 

welfare of its constituent members. If their 
welfare is nonexistent, it is sheer German 
Kultur to talk about the value of a state. 



Elementary Americanism is the denial of 
class structure in the state. Its validity does 
not rest upon a priori considerations. You 
can trace the development of the ever-grow- 
ing recognition of the individual as the 
genius of its history. 

How, then, did it arise? It certainly was 
not present in the England of the Stuarts. 
But English class distinctions did not cross 
the Atlantic. Neither kings, clergy, nor 
nobles have been colonists. The Atlantic 
was a nonconductor of class consciousness. 
It was men of the middle class, chafing 
under the pressure of a social order, who 
dared to cross the Atlantic. An adventurer 
is bound to be an individualist, else he would 
not be an adventurer. The men and women 
who left England were those who wanted 
liberty, and liberty to Englishmen is a 
synonym of individualism. 

The social stratification of England in the 
seventeenth century forbade equality of op- 



46 THE VALIDITY OF 

portunity. Various feudal survivals still 
abounded. The rights of Enghshmen were 
not equally extensive. The farm worker had 
no equality of opportunity with the lord of 
the manor; the Cathohc and Independent 
did not have the rights of the member of the 
state church. A recollection of this inequal- 
ity, which was less marked in England than 
on the Continent, must have formed the 
backgroimd of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. When the period of English mi- 
gration set in, members of the great middle 
class, and they alone, settled in America. 
Differences in wealth were not sufficiently 
great to lay the foundation for a new class 
spirit. It is true that the Puritans of Massa- 
chusetts when compared with the Pilgrims of 
Plymouth seem aristocratic, but the dis- 
tinction is rhetorical rather than actual. 
While there were indentured servants in 
more than one colony, there was nothing of 
genuine class spirit in the New World, and 
these servants soon took up land and be- 
came citizens. In Virginia there was a some- 
what different structure of society than in 
New England, but even there the "first 
famihes" were not titled and the small 



AMERICAN IDEALS 47 

farmers on the west of the colony were soon 
to show that they had pohtical power. In 
all the colonies there was opportunity for 
each man to move straight forward into in- 
dependence ; on the farm which he carved out 
from forests he was proud of the rights 
which he enjoyed as an Enghshman and a 
citizen. 

It is worth noticing that this new indi- 
vidualism involving equal rights and obliga- 
tions approved itself to men who at the start 
undertook an approach to community life. 
At Plymouth the Planters, as the settlers 
under the various companies of Adventurers 
were called, agreed to hold land in common. 
Sometimes this has been spoken of as an at- 
tempt at conmiunism, but incorrectly. It 
was, rather, a case of postponing the dis- 
tribution of the profits of the company. 
Land was to be held without distribution for 
a number of years and then the various 
shareholders in the company, among them 
the colonists, were to divide the outcome of 
their industry and investment. But this 
plan soon proved to be unworkable, even in 
a community like that of Plymouth. Those 
who were industrious found themselves com- 



48 THE VALIDITY OF 

pelled to work for the inefficient and lazy, 
and soon demanded that the division of the 
land should be immediate rather than post- 
poned. The individual had triumphed over 
the Company. 

Within the colonies of New England the 
rights which the members of the colony pos- 
sessed practically were soon given theoreti- 
cal confirmation. This was born, not of 
philosophy but of historical situations. The 
town meeting and the Congregational 
churches expressed phases of the same social 
mind. In the churches the congregation had 
the right of voting, and this right of par- 
ticipation in administration was also exer- 
cised in the town meeting. It was at first 
natural that the citizens should be yeomen 
who were church members, but this early 
limitation of suffrage was soon found to be 
impracticable and the non-church member 
was admitted to full rights of citizenship. 
The religious justification of such equality, 
however, persisted. The rights of the colo- 
nists came to be thought of as the rights of 
men, granted by a Sovereign God. If Pro- 
fessor Jellinek is to be trusted, the natural 
rights of the French philosophers, or at least 



AMERICAN IDEALS 49 

the Declaration of Rights made by the 
French constitutions, are to be traced back 
to similar declarations to be found in these 
early Congregational states. Thus in New 
England the two currents of development of 
English individualism met. The church and 
the town meeting became the foundation 
stones of American conception of individual 
equality. 

Geography still furthered the develop- 
ment of the individual. I said just now that 
the path of opportunity lay forward for each 
colonist. It ran westward. Beyond the coast 
there lay the forests where any man could 
build his home. The colonists were essen- 
tially farmers and fishermen. The stores of 
iron and coal which were later to compel the 
segregation of workers lay undiscovered in 
the mountains. Because of climate and other 
physical conditions the colonists were forced 
to specialize in their agriculture, and this led 
to conditions which were to have vast influ- 
ence on the course of American life. In the 
South the most profitable crops were tobacco 
and rice. Both of these were more profit- 
ably raised in large plantations than in small 
farms. In the North, and especially in New 



50 THE VALIDITY OF 

England, however, the chief agricultural 
product was foodstuff. Grain and root 
crops are possible on small land holdings, 
and so the northern section became broken 
up into small farms where their owners lived. 
This separation of farmers tended toward in- 
dependence and self-reliance in character. 
Frontier farms were tilled by their owners 
and not by slaves. 

As the number of colonists increased, this 
extension from the tidewater toward the 
West became ever greater and the frontier 
began to exert an influence hard to over- 
estimate. In fact, in no small degree Amer- 
ican individualism is the child of the frontier 
farm. One has only to picture half a conti- 
nent covered with an enormous forest filled 
with wild beasts and Indians, to reahze how 
severe must have been the testing of the men 
and women who pushed forward the wave of 
white settlements and farms. Along this 
frontier as it spread its concentric lines west- 
ward one will find the development of an 
ever-increasing democratic spirit and at the 
same time many elements of the new Amer- 
ican spirit. Only those with initiative and 
patience could succeed. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 51 

The individual, however, is something 
more than an economic unit of society. The 
production of material wealth is not in itself 
a sufficient explanation of human advance. 
Geographical influences, which make eco- 
nomic variations inevitable, are not the sole 
cause of social development. These pioneers, 
therefore, were something more than pawns 
of mountains, forests, and rivers. Forced 
as they were to desperate struggle with na- 
ture, they saw before them something more 
than crops and herds. They built schools 
where their children might be prepared to 
live as well as to make a living. If they did 
not produce great poets, they produced 
great hopes. American men and women had 
interests which were of the soul. Religion 
spread its way from cabin to cabin and from 
settlement to settlement in the person of 
itinerant Baptist, Methodist, and Presby- 
terian preachers. The Scotch-Irish along 
the frontier of Pennsylvania and the small 
farmers of Virginia were particularly re- 
sponsive to this new type of preaching which 
heralded the worth of each soul. Revivals 
were the approved type of religious service 
and served with the elections as the chief 



52 THE VALIDITY OF 

bond to bring these scattered pioneers to- 
gether. In the very nature of the case these 
frontier people were forced to be self-rehant, 
and distinctions of wealth and social classes 
were impossible. Men were grappling hand 
to hand with nature, and a strong arm and a 
keen eye counted more than gentle blood. 
While towns on the seaboard were develop- 
ing a theory of individual equality from their 
institutions, the frontiersmen were making 
this equaUty and independence a national 
leaven. 

These pioneers gave themselves to politics. 
They beheved that they were able to govern 
themselves. When once the second genera- 
tion had reached maturity they unhesitat- 
ingly cast off the leadership of those ele- 
ments of society which were content to per- 
petuate conditions which they had controlled, 
and elected members of their own class to 
office and recast all laws that seemed to 
threaten a re-establishment of social classes. 

Few of them were hmited by their mem- 
bership in a common economic adventure. 
Pontics, religion, education, and by degrees 
philanthropy and business gave them a di- 
versity of interests. The individual thus de- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 53 

veloped as a member of several groups with 
a constant tendency to a multiplication of 
groups rather than a consolidation of in- 
terests in some one association which set 
bounds upon individual action. The avoca- 
tions of life offset the vocations which 
brought daily bread, and, in the midst of an 
astonishing economic development, pre- 
vented class-consciousness and class-control. 
Thus actual forces and circumstances, the 
very land itself, the absence of roads and 
other means of communication, were devel- 
oping among men conditions that evoked ex- 
panded ideals of freedom and equality. Re- 
gard for the individual became a striking 
characteristic of American life. To appre- 
ciate it one has only to recall the course of 
contemporary social development on the 
Continent. There a succession of terrible 
wars resulted in large and small states under 
the control of absolute rulers, the oppression 
of the peasantry, the destruction of even 
partial constitutional rights enjoyed by sub- 
jects, the transformation of feudal rights 
and duties into irresponsible privilege. It 
was not from philosophers primarily but 
from the new spirit which was developing in 



54 THE VALIDITY OF 

America that directly or indirectly the revo- 
lutions of the eighteenth century were to 
come. And the justification of these revolu- 
tions was found in the conception of the 
rights of the individual, of which continental 
Europe knew nothing, but which had been 
especially recognized and formulated by the 
nation builders on the North American con- 
tinent. It is no wonder that America be- 
came the haven of the oppressed. Here 
alone could individuals be free. 

In the original individualism of the Amer- 
ican people one discovers seriousness and 
self-control. It is customary to call this 
type of mind Puritan. Now, if there is any- 
thing our young intellectuals abhor, it is 
Puritanism. To them it is the very consum- 
mation of all that restrains what they are 
pleased to call creative self-expression. 
Themselves possessed of no particular sense 
of the necessity of self-restraint either in ac- 
tion or in words, they see only the less at- 
tractive elements in the life of the fore- 
fathers of our American republic. In their 
minds to be a Puritan is to be a hypocrite. 

It is no accident that most of these critics 
of Puritanism come from continental stocks. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 55 

In many cases the young intellectual is of 
some oppressed race in revolt against the ex- 
cessive restraints with which his (or her) 
fathers had been surrounded. To such minds 
a fair appreciation of the Puritan is all but 
impossible. Idealism with them is essen- 
tially revolutionary. They think only of the 
liberty of classes — in particular, the prole- 
tariat. The liberty into which such immi- 
grants to America are thrust dissolves all re- 
gard for the past and authority in the pres- 
ent. Neither they nor their forbears have 
had any share in the long spiritual struggle 
from which springs the American liberty 
they have fled to enjoy. Indeed, coupled 
with their contempt of Puritanism is a ha- 
tred of EngUsh institutions. To decry Puri- 
tanism seems an ethnic duty. A glorifica- 
tion of an imagined state of freedom which 
no race ever enjoyed, least of all that from 
which they have sprung, seems the only 
means of expressing their intoxicated souls. 
If one examines this new liberty for which 
the opponents of Puritanism plead, it ap- 
pears to be a one-sided exposition of the in- 
dividualism evolved by the Anglo-Saxon in 
England and America and a rejection of 



56 THE VALIDITY OF 

that self-control which has made Anglo-Sax- 
ons capable of originating the very liberty 
which intellectualism exploits. A man in 
revolt from all restraints is not capable of 
producing even the class soKdarity which he 
praises. Society has never been and never 
will be composed of anarchists. Its very ex- 
istence depends on authority of some sort. 
If individuals lack the capacity for self- 
restraint, if they claim only the right to do 
as they please and gratify whatever desires 
may happen to be dominant in their inner 
being, an authority from without is indis- 
pensable. If, on the other hand, individuals 
have learned to distinguish between perma- 
nent and temporary values of life, if they 
have learned that there is a difference be- 
tween evil and good, if they have come to see 
that the significant things of hf e must often 
involve the sacrifice of the less significant, 
if they deliberately set themselves to subor- 
dinate physical pleasure to the things of the 
spirit, they are the sort of men and women 
who gave the world constitutional liberty, 
religious freedom, and democracies. Young 
intellectuals may well rejoice that there have 
been such men. Otherwise they would never 



AMERICAN IDEALS 57 

enjoy the institutions their errant omnis- 
cience belittles. 

The Puritan was of this serious mind. No 
caricature drawn from Blue Laws which 
never existed should be permitted to obscure 
his real contributions to democratic develop- 
ment. If the colonists and first generation 
of citizens of the new United States had been 
devotees of clever phrases and creature com- 
forts, we should never have had the liberties 
we now enjoy. Pleasure-seekers have never 
been the ancestors of great states. Intellec- 
tual anarchists, despisers of authority, evan- 
gelists of Utopias whose chief substance is 
riotous rhetoric, have never done more than 
destroy. They have disintegrated au- 
thority, but they have never built states. Un- 
restrained orators of liberty which means 
only license, they have either been parasites 
upon the political achievements of men who, 
like the Puritans, soberly recognize the re- 
sponsibilities of liberty, or have been creators 
of reigns of terror. 

It is difficult for the historian of America 
to keep his patience in the presence of the 
anti-Puritan as he attributes the evils of to- 
day to the survival of Puritan attitudes. He 



58 THE VALIDITY OF 

knows the limitations of Puritan life — its too 
eager buffeting of the self lest it weakly yield 
to the enjoyment of the senses, its deprecia- 
tion of beauty, its overemphasis of other- 
worldliness; but he knows also its idealism, 
its democratic instinct, its pursuit of spiritual 
values, its capacity to build self -determining 
states from self-ruled citizens. While it 
would have none of that self-indulgent pa- 
ganism which so appeals to men and women 
without sense of social responsibility, Puri- 
tanism was an enemy of asceticism, the 
champion of honest pleasures and education, 
the founder of institutions that have pre- 
vented the rapid development of wealth from 
becoming a new feudalism and absolutism. 
I would not minimize the contributions of 
many another spirit to American life. Above 
all, I would not identify the American with 
the Englishman. But this fact cannot be 
denied: back of democracy stands the Puri- 
tan and, I had almost said, only the Puri- 
tan. Other men have entered into his labors, 
but he labored first. 

It is not for us to reinstate the laws of 
Massachusetts Bay or the rough-and-ready 
social life of the frontier; but a nation com- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 59 

posed of men and women lacking the first 
rudiments of self-control, without sufficient 
insight to choose permanent rather than 
ephemeral goods, would be one of moral de- 
bihty and pohtical anarchy. If our young in- 
tellectuals would undertake to emulate the 
constructive virtues of the Puritan, they 
would be less intolerant of his errors. And 
they would be taken more seriously. For if 
in a search for founders of a new social order 
the choice should be forced between Puritans 
and men and women who prefer Cabell to 
Thackeray, Ezra Pound to Tennyson, 
Lenin to George Washington, parlor so- 
cialism to representative government, affini- 
ties to homes, momentary pleasure to thrift, 
and Nietzsche to Jesus Christ; men who 
know that building a state is something more 
than writing pamphlets and that a constitu- 
tion is something more than epigrams and 
vers Uhrey will choose the Puritan with his 
serious-minded individuahsm rather than 
the young intellectual with his free spirit. 
For history has proved his ideals vahd. 

II 

The developments of the rights of the in- 



60 THE VALIDITY OF 

dividual did not stop with the colonial and 
early national period of our country. There 
were still the slave and the woman, neither 
of whom fully enjoyed the advantages of 
the new epoch, and both of whom have dur- ' 
ing the last century been given rights as per- 
sons. 

As regards the slave we must again recog- 
nize that geographical and economic forces 
have been the occasion of struggles from 
which personal rights have emerged. Here 
again we can see that America has evolved 
loyalty to ideals under actual conditions 
rather than through deductive analysis of 
abstract rights. 

To appreciate the real significance of 
slavery to individuahsm in America, it is i 
necessary to remember that it passed 
through a series of stages, each more or less 
shaped by economic forces. In the eigh- 
teenth century slavery was all but universal 
in the American colonies ; one out of every 
fifty inhabitants of Massachusetts, for in- 
stance, being a slave. Yet at the time of the 
adoption of the Constitution there was all 
but uniform belief in both North and South 
that slavery would ultimately disappear be- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 61 

cause of the stopping of the slave trade. The 
Quakers had characteristically opposed 
slavery on religious grounds, although their 
relatively small numbers had prevented their 
having influence sufficient to abolish it 
throughout the colonies. But opposition to 
the institution was by no means limited to 
these earnest Christians. In 1780 a Meth- 
odist Ministers' Conference declared that 
"Slavery is contrary to the golden law of 
God and the inahenable rights of mankind." 
In 1789 the Baptist Association of Virginia 
voted that "Slavery is a violent deprivation 
of the rights of nature and inconsistent with 
representative government. We recommend 
to our brethren to make use of every legal 
measure to extirpate this horrid evil from 
the land." By 1804 seven of the original 
States had abohshed slavery and all thirteen, 
except South Carolina, had prohibited the 
slave trade. In the course of a few years 
practically no slaves were held in the North, 
and the slave trade was forbidden under se- 
vere penalties. The political leaders of the 
South were not committed to the system in 
any philosophical way and had voted to make 
the Northwestern Territory free soil. The 



62 THE VALIDITY OF 

slave-holding group was numerically small 
although autocratic in politics and social hf e. 

That slavery should become the center of 
sectional policies and a social philosophy was 
due to an unexpected and vast development 
in capitalism. The invention of the cotton 
gin committed the South to King Cotton. 
Instead of diversified farming, a one-crop 
system arose which required practically no 
skilled labor. Sugar and rice became of 
secondary importance. The tobacco crop, 
though still a source of great wealth, was de- 
stroying the fertility of the soil, and Virginia 
and the other tobacco-raising States became 
slave-breeding States for the benefit of those 
where cotton could be raised. 

This economic revolution was to have pro- 
found effect upon the political and social 
theories of the two sections of the country. 
Manufactories and wage-systems were un- 
known to the South, and labor, instead of 
being universal among the whites as in the 
North, was largely limited to the Negro. In 
the North the development of capitalism 
took the form of industrial expansion ; in the 
South it was wholly centered around the 
labor of the Negro slave. Prior to 1820 



AMERICAN IDEALS 63 

these two interests had come into more or 
less serious conflict in the embargo policy 
of Jefferson and the War of 1812. In 1820, 
with almost startling suddenness, the conflict 
for the maintenance of individual rights ap- 
peared in the struggle to maintain a balance 
of power between the two rival sections of 
the country in the Senate. 

The land between the Mississippi, the 
Ohio, and the Atlantic, which had been ceded 
by various States to the Union, had been or- 
ganized in States where the rights of the 
slave owner were undisputed. The vast 
Louisiana territory purchased from Na- 
poleon, except in Missouri unsettled, had 
been left without designation. When Mis- 
souri sought admission as a State the two 
sections immediately clashed. The North- 
ern States demanded that Missouri should be 
a free State; the Southern States demanded 
that the existence of slavery already present 
within its limits should be recognized. For 
a few months the two policies seemed incapa- 
ble of agreement. But at last a compromise 
was reached which permitted the admission 
of Maine as a free State and Missouri as a 
slave State, with the decision that slavery 



64 THE VALIDITY OF 

within its limits should not extend north of 
36:30. The compromise was epochal not 
only in that it permitted the extension of 
slaves in the territory south of 36 :30, and in 
the opinion of a majority of Congress recog- 
nized the right of Congress to forbid slavery 
in the territories; but also in the more 
important fact that while the Union had been 
saved, two economic systems and two esti- 
mates of the worth of individuals had been 
brought into irrepressible conflict. From 
1820 the South stood for a capitalism that 
denied personal rights to the workman ; the 
North for a capitalism that regarded work- 
men as persons. The struggle reached over 
into religion. In 1835 the Rev. James 
Smylie declared that slavery was good and 
righteous according to the Bible. In 1837 
the Presbyterian body split over the issue, 
to be followed in 1844 by the Methodists and 
in 1845 by the Baptists. 

The year 1850 saw the completion of the 
economic-social philosophy in the attitude of 
the South. Slavery, instead of being re- 
garded as an incident in the economic life, 
served as the basis of a complete philosophy 
of society. The eighteenth-century doctrine 



AMERICAN IDEALS " 65 

of Jefferson with its insistence that all men 
were created equal was frankly discarded. 
A group of political teachers, chief among 
whom were Thomas R. Dew, of William and 
Mary College, and Chancellor Harper, of 
South Carolina, elaborately argued the ne- 
cessity of social classes. This new philoso- 
phy argued that civihzation demanded the 
"forced labor of masses of ignorant people 
whom to make free would be a social crime." 
Furthermore, it was claimed that the Bible 
and the Christian Church sustained slavery 
as an institution. Chancellor Harper stated 
in 1837 that "the exclusive owners of prop- 
erty ever have been, ever will be, and perhaps 
ever ought to be the virtual rulers of man- 
kind. ... It is as much in the order of na- 
ture that men should enslave each other as 
that animals should prey upon each other." 
Harper declared that it was palpably untrue 
to say that every man was born free. The 
proclivity of the natural man is to dominate 
or to be subservient, for "if there are sordid, 
servile, and laborious offices to be performed, 
is it not better that there should be sordid, 
servile, and laborious beings to perform 
them!" At the same time Calhoun openly 



66 THE VALIDITY OF 

declared slavery to be a blessing. "Nothing 
can be more unfounded and false," he said, 
"than the opinion that all men are born free 
and equal; inequality is indispensable to 
progress; government is not the result of 
compact, nor is it safe to intrust the suffrage 
to all." Governor McDuffie, in a message to 
the Legislature of South Carolina, affirmed 
that "domestic slavery is the cornerstone of 
our republic edifice." The philosophy of 
absolute capitahsm and class control was 
never more radically stated. 

As the tide of population moved west into 
the uninhabited territory, it was inevitable 
that the struggle should become intense. 
The two types of economic development as 
represented by the North and the South 
were incompatible with each other. Capital- 
ism with free labor did not exist and could 
not exist by the side of slavery, and capital- 
ism with slavery could not exist in the pres- 
ence of free labor. The disappearance of 
the one was necessary for the existence of 
the other. The bitter struggle over the Fu- 
gitive Slave Law and the Kansas and 
Nebraska struggle were thus phases of a 
conflict which was irrepressible, not simply 



AMERICAN IDEALS 67 

on moral grounds, but also because of the 
inner tendencies of national expansion. The 
social order which controlled the vast area 
west of the Mississippi was to control the 
nation. American democracy itself was at 
stake. 

I would not minimize the moral elements 
of the struggle over slavery. But morality 
is never abstract. It deals with concrete is- 
sues, individual rights and social orders. It 
emerges from economic situations which give 
motives and evoke ideals for human rela- 
tionships. There were men in the North who 
argued the question abstractly and scrip- 
turally. But they were agitators rather than 
constructive forces. The great current of 
moral convictions as to human individuality 
was determined in the conflict of two rival 
social orders. The moral fervor of Garri- 
son and Channing became a leaven in one of 
these orders and a center of bitterness in the 
other. Slavery, like the saloon, was doomed 
by a new social conscience because fatal to 
individual rights, but its destruction came 
only in the destruction of an economic and 
social order of which it had become the nu- 
cleus. 



68 THE VALIDITY OF 

The struggle which ensued was ultimately 
over individuals as such. The South sin- 
cerely believed in and championed a social 
structure which was frankly consistent. The 
North was developing a modern conception 
of the capitalistic system in which wage- 
earners act as free persons, both politically 
and economically. The factory of the North 
was manufacturing a social theory, a moral 
ideal, and a new individualism, as well as 
cloth. The period of compromise gave time 
for the development of national forces, and 
the issue was determined by social evolution 
fixed by moral idealism rather than by the 
relative valor of the two parties to the terri- 
ble conflict of 1861-65. Appomattox for- 
ever banished from America any social 
theory that denied personahty to the worker. 
The surrender of Lee meant the disappear- 
ance of capitalistic absolutism and the tri- 
umph of the ideal of individual rights. 

The world in which we live seems far re- 
moved from 1865, but it contains the ele- 
ments of a similar but even greater struggle. 
The opposing forces are no longer separated 
by a river and a surveyor's line; they run 
across the social organization of an entire 



AMERICAN IDEALS 69 

world. The parties to the struggle, for- 
tunately, are no longer slaves and their mas- 
ters. To speak of to-day's wage-earner as a 
slave is to use the rhetoric of the demagogue. 
None the less, superior as was the wage- 
capitalism which became dominant in the 
nineteenth century to the capitalism of the 
slave-owning class, it bequeathed to the 
twentieth century the problem as to whether 
labor is to be treated as a commodity or as 
a personal contribution to the productive 
process. That is the great issue in civihza- 
tion. About it the organized forces of capi- 
tal and labor are at present struggling. In 
its magnitude and elements it is a new issue. 
Our nation must therefore work out its fu- 
ture less in accordance with precedent than 
with tendencies and forces within the social 
process itself. These tendencies come over 
from the immediate past. The evolution of 
industrial life in the nineteenth century in- 
dicates the tendency to which we must look 
for the answer to our present industrial prob- 
lems. That answer in brief is this : the true 
solution of industrial unrest is the recogni- 
tion of personal elements in the economic 
processes ; of the wage-earner as an individ- 



70 THE VALIDITY OF 

ual. The world of to-morrow must be a 
better place for men and women to live in — 
not merely to grow rich in. 

How these personal values can be reached 
will be settled by the trial and failure method 
which the world now employs. There will 
be periods of compromise. There will be at- 
tempts at radical reorganization such as 
those proposed by socialists, both revolution- 
ary and evolutionary. Just what will be the 
precise outcome of these struggles we can 
no more tell than the men of 1820 and 1850 
could foretell the precise outcome of the 
struggle between the economic and political 
tendencies of the North and South. But one 
thing is already certain — America is not 
headed toward the philosophy of the South- 
ern statesmen. It projects still further the 
advance from a slave to the wage-earner. It 
will assure the participation of the wage- 
earner in the personal control of his con- 
tribution to production. There will be no 
return to autocratic capitalism. The cap- 
italism of to-day will in its turn further per- 
sonal rights of the individual lest it be swept 
away like that of the slave-holder. Individu- 
alism, subject to new social conditions set by 



AMERICAN IDEALS 71 

economic development, is a synonym of 
Americanism. 

The second evolution of personal rights, 
those of women, has not been so dramatic in 
America as that which ended slavery, but it 
is none the less significant of the germinal 
power of an ideal. It may be surprising that 
the progress of women's rights in America 
has been slower than in certain other coun- 
tries. Years before full suffrage was ex- 
tended to women in the United States it 
was given in Australasia, Norway, Finland, 
Saxony, and various other Continental coun- 
tries. It would be an interesting topic for 
speculation as to just why English-speaking 
people lagged behind others in this regard, 
but any explanation that might be suggested 
testifies to the essential conservatism of the 
very men who were carrying forward liberal 
ideals in pohtics, business, education, and 
religion. It may possibly have been that 
the high position which women held in 
America made for certain dilatoriness in en- 
larging their personal rights. In 1797 
Charles Fox doubtless represented the posi- 
tion of liberal Englishmen when he said, "It 
has never been suggested in all the theories 



72 THE VALIDITY OF 

and projects of the most absurd speculation 
that it would be advisable to extend the elec- 
tive suffrage to the female sex." And it is 
noteworthy that in the extension of suffrage 
rights to women the leaders have been the 
frontier rather than the older States. Wyo- 
ming, Kansas, Colorado, Michigan, and 
Minnesota have been the leaders in giving 
women the right to vote either for some or 
all offices. It was in 1848 that the first con- 
vention to discuss the social, civil, and re- 
ligious condition and rights of women was 
held at Seneca Falls, New York. At this 
meeting there was adopted a sort of declara- 
tion of women's independence modeled after 
that of the famous document of 1776. A 
study of that declaration will show how far 
short the American woman came of enjoy- 
ing the rights which now are hers. But de- 
spite conservative forebodings, the exten- 
sion of these rights has steadily progressed 
until the Constitution of the government it- 
self has been amended so as to give women 
the full suffrage rights of men. It is a far 
cry from the present position of women to 
that occupied by them a generation ago in 
practically every State in the Union, but it 



AMERICAN IDEALS 73 

is simply the completion of the conception 
of American individualism. Those that have 
privilege must have responsibility; those that 
have responsibility must have liberty to ex- 
ercise it. 

Ill 

This estimate which American history has 
placed upon the individual is threatened by 
two conditions in our national life. 

There is, first, the rise of class conscious- 
ness and class organization. Due in no small 
degree to the evolution of industrialism, this 
danger to the American ideal springs from 
the importation into America of Continental 
ideas and experience. Most leaders in the 
attempt at class organization and class con- 
flict are not Anglo-Saxons or native Amer- 
icans. They are the product of the struggle 
for liberty in those countries of Europe 
where class organization still survives and 
the conception of the individual has been ob- 
scured by the existence of class subjection. 
In such countries efforts for liberty have nat- 
urally been those of classes. When such 
ideals are introduced in America they strike 
at the foundation of our social life and in- 



74 THE VALIDITY OF 

volve much more than economic adjustment. 
They would remake America itself. Their 
success would mean that American institu- 
tions have been de-Americanized by persons 
who are not the products of our social his- 
tory. Yet the facts that occasion such a pro- 
gram must be recognized. 

We are now in the midst of a process the 
opposite of that which produced our indi- 
vidualism. The occupation of a vast new 
country served to disintegrate social mole- 
cules into their component atoms. Our mod- 
ern conditions are a new process of integra- 
tion. If the analogy between social and 
physical processes were perfect, reintegra- 
tion might mean the loss of individuality in 
new social compounds. And that is pre- 
cisely what our new generation of social 
philosophers seems to desire. But the anal- 
ogy is not perfect. Human beings are not 
unconscious atoms. They are persons, capa- 
ble of preserving in their new combinations 
something of the self-reliance and self -esti- 
mate gained during the short period of re- 
lease from the control of highly organized 
group life. It is impossible to undo com- 
pletely the results of the development of the 



AMERICAN IDEALS 75 

past century. We shall never see a return 
to slavery or serfdom or the "subjection of 
women." There is, however, in progress a 
recombination of social elements due to the 
economic separation of those who own ma- 
chines from those who work machines ; or, in 
more general terms, into those who receive 
profits and interest and those who receive 
wages. Such segregation may offset the 
equality of opportunity on the part of in- 
dividuals. Control over its members by the 
labor union is pronounced, while freedom of 
competition and even of initiative on the part 
of manufacturers is often checked by organ- 
izations which, sometimes in collusion with 
labor leaders, control markets and prices. 

Such facts are data, rather than subjects 
of mere regret. However much certain per- 
sons might desire to resolve American so- 
ciety into insulated individuals, such an at- 
tempt is impossible. Our present task re- 
quires far wider vision and better technique 
than either the radical individualist or the 
radical socialist possesses. They both would 
attempt to run American life into the mold 
of a formula. What actually must be done 
is to develop a social order in which the in- 



76 THE VALIDITY OF 

dividual may grow social and enter into 
group-activity without thereby losing a 
sense of his own final worth. We have to 
develop morale not for atomistic individuals 
but for individuals in their economic groups. 
There can be little question that the pres- 
ent increase of such groups is not conducive 
to that liberty of individual action which 
made the United States what it is. It is one 
thing for an immigrant to settle on a farm 
where he is spatially independent and 
quite another thing for him to settle in the 
midst of a great city, work machines which 
he does not own, and join unions which bar- 
gain collectively. The pioneer and children 
of pioneers in the very nature of the case 
found themselves self-dependent, each fam- 
ily forming a httle world in itself. The chil- 
dren of immigrants who have settled by the 
millions in the city have no conditions which 
urge individualistic development and many 
that demand group action both for defense 
and for new advantages. The range of op- 
portunity for self-determination under such 
conditions is limited. Such collective opera- 
tion as our industrial processes involve tends 
to make types rather than individuals. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 77 

When a sense of freedom sways such per- 
sons it too often takes the form of a desire 
for class hberty and class control — the bat- 
tle-cries of an ahen social history. 

If such development is unavoidable, either 
our American ideal of opportunity for every 
individual will be abandoned, and instead 
of the foreigner being Americanized the 
American will be foreignized, or our con- 
ception of the individual must be adapted to 
new conditions. If, as we must believe, the 
second alternative is to prevail, we face a 
task which cannot be escaped: the mainte- 
nance of individual liberty in the midst of 
industrial groups. Hitherto such classifica- 
tion has tended to solidify itself and to make 
the passage of individuals from one class to 
another all but impossible. This has been 
the history of social development on the con- 
tinent of Europe. From this has come revo- 
lution, that is, the determination of one 
class as a class to enjoy by conquest the priv- 
ileges shared by another class. In our 
American life the way has lain and must still 
lie open to every man who will utihze the 
opportunities which he may have and will 
play the game according to the rules which 



78 THE VALIDITY OF 

are now set. To protect this inherited equal- 
ity of opportunity is an imminent duty. Nor 
is it impossible. 

One corrective to the deindividualizing of 
those forces into economic groups is an en- 
riched liberty in noneconomic life. As has 
been already pointed out, American indi- 
vidualism involves something more than 
economic interests. It concerns the entire 
personality. A little while ago an interest- 
ing little book was written about a New 
Englander who lost his money and joined 
the workingmen. He found there a liberty 
and a group of privileges he never could 
have enjoyed as a salaried person with a 
certain social status to maintain. He found 
opportunities for study furnished free or at 
small expense, amusements, churches, public 
parks and playgrounds for his children. 
Suddenly he reahzed that as a member of a 
class that he had judged unfree he was 
freer to develop his own hf e than he had been 
as a respectable salaried person trying to ape 
the habits of persons with larger incomes. 
As he himself said, this New Englander had 
really discovered America. 

This discovery, however, must be more 



AMERICAN IDEALS 79 

than a mere literary tour de force. Our col- 
lective life must be so organized that all in- 
dividuals have this sort of freedom. 

But freedom will not come to-day any 
more than in the past to people who are 
afraid to take risks. It requires much the 
same sort of spirit of adventure for a family 
in touch with families of larger income to 
practice thrift as it required for our ances- 
tors to break up the prairie. It takes daring 
for a man of small income to save money. It 
takes self-control to substitute study for 
cheap amusements. It is training in indi- 
vidualism for a young man to refuse to go 
with ''his crowd" and for a young woman to 
decline to follow styles of dress and dancing. 
All such individualism, however, is possible 
in America. Social distinctions are economic 
and not those of opportunity. So long as 
we build no political or social wall around 
economic classes, so long the spirit of indi- 
vidualism may hope to survive. 

How far it is possible for us to recognize 
the individual as over against economic 
groups of individuals has not yet been deter- 
mined. In this regard as well as others, 
America is still in the making. Economic 



80 THE VALIDITY OF 

struggle necessitates the consolidation of op- 
posing interests. One moment union labor 
seems in the saddle, another moment the 
champions of the open shop. In theory the 
genuinely open shop (not the open shop 
which is a closed shop to unionized workers ) 
seems undoubtedly more in accord with the 
American spirit of giving equal rights to all. 
It is a fair question, however, whether the 
open shop could maintain the advantages 
which its members enjoy if there were not or- 
ganized labor. But the question is simply 
one phase of the larger problem as to how 
individualism can be maintained in the midst 
of economic collectivism involved in trade 
unions and collective bargaining of all sorts. 
My own faith is that the American life will 
dare set precedents here as in the past. It 
developed the agrarian and commercial in- 
dividuahsm. It will now develop individual- 
ism in an industrial order. But just as 
agrarian and commercial individuahsm was 
dependent upon the actual conditions set by 
farming and commerce, so industrial indi- 
vidualism will have to reckon with the actual 
conditions set by our economic life. To pre- 
vent the tyranny of class-consciousness 



AMERICAN IDEALS 81 

among great bodies of men and women of 
necessity living in close vicinity to the ma- 
chines which they run and by the nature of 
their occupation forced to work in large 
groups, requires works as well as faith. If 
we are not to develop a new un-American 
America— "our America," as the anti-An- 
glo-Saxon, anti-Puritan, anti-individual 
leaders dare to call it — it is necessary to pre- 
vent the absorption of interests by one eco- 
nomic group life. Every American can and 
should belong to a variety of groups, each 
representing different social ideals. In the 
resulting fellowship class distinctions will 
be offset. The church is one of these groups, 
the school, the college, the neighborhood, the 
political party, the athletic club, the philan- 
thropic association are others, and the list 
can be indefinitely lengthened. In no coun- 
try is there the abundance of group interests 
as in America. To consolidate them in eco- 
nomic classes would be to submerge indi- 
viduality. To scatter individuals among 
them is to reproduce in our more complex 
social life the forces that made toward in- 
dividual development in early American his- 
tory. To make social life center about the 



82 THE VALIDITY OF 

economic is an attack on Americanism. Eco- 
nomic interests, whether capitalistic or labor, 
may unintelligently favor such a consolida- 
tion, through the bitterness of strife, but all 
the more zealously should those who wish 
America to remain true to its history and 
genius seek to make diversity of group in- 
terest possible and inevitable. Exhortation 
and denunciation must yield to practical 
measures. Economic warfare between em- 
ployers and labor unions must be replaced 
by cooperation and arbitration. Our public 
school should be preserved from efforts to 
use education in the interests of segregated 
religion or race. Only as individuals share 
in other than single groups can the individ- 
ual be preserved from subordination to 
class. And only thus can genuine Amer- 
icanism survive. 

The second foe of individualism in Amer- 
ica is the limitation set by ethnic groups. 
Statistics make no impression upon most of 
us, and perhaps it is well, but no one can even 
superficially examine a census report with- 
out being impressed with the problem of our 
foreign citizenship. If it were simply a mat- 
ter of birthplace, it would be simple, but the 



AMERICAN IDEALS 83 

history of the United States shows plainly 
that foreign groups tend to segregate. One 
has only to walk across the lower end of 
New York City to understand what this 
means. The same conditions are to be found 
not only in all cities and larger communi- 
ties, but in country districts as well. Very 
few foreign people have migrated as yet to 
the south of the Mason and Dixon line, but 
in the North an ethnographic map would 
show the tendency toward segregation of 
representatives of the various nations of the 
world. Nor is this tendency in many of 
these ethnic groups removed in the second 
generation. Members of the groups find 
opportunity in the larger American life for 
getting wealth and political power, but the 
ethnic solidarity is locally maintained by 
churches, schools, and social customs. The 
individual remains, therefore, to a very con- 
siderable extent, a member of a group. Par- 
ticularly is this true when interested parties 
maintain propaganda in glorification of the 
fatherland. In too many cases the immi- 
grant moves from a native group across the 
seas into a group possessing almost the same 
characteristics in America. 



84 THE VALIDITY OF 

As an illustration of such ethnic solidarity 
we may refer, not to a foreign group, but to 
the Negroes. The curse of slavery has out- 
lived the emancipation of slaves. A few 
years ago the problem seemed to be one 
largely of numbers and so confined to the 
South. Individual Negroes in the North 
lived as any newcomer might live in our 
towns and cities. They did not intermarry, 
they were not given social standing, but the 
same was largely true of members of other 
nationalities. But within the last few years 
there have been decided changes, some of 
them, I regret to say, decidedly for the 
worse. The Negro in the North doubtless 
has more political freedom than in the South, 
but the increase in the Negro population 
has tended to transfer to the North some of 
the most difficult problems of the South. 
We have lynchings, race riots, bombings, in 
the North. Labor unions have discrimin- 
ated against the Negro and race hatred has 
already expressed itself among people of 
the lower classes. 

At the same time the experience of the 
Negroes in the Great War has given them a 
new sense of personal worth. Education 



AMERICAN IDEALS 85 

has made them feel an intellectual equality 
and business success has given them self- 
respect. Among themselves the coopera- 
tion of both these two new conditions is pro- 
ducing a racial self-consciousness that is 
capable of almost any sort of outcome ac- 
cording to the treatment it is accorded. In 
Northern cities the border line of popula- 
tion is already experiencing the demand of 
the Negroes for treatment on the same equal- 
ity in schools and in social settlements, if 
not in other ways. That is to say, the Ne- 
gro problem can to-day no more than in 1861 
be detached from that of the worth of indi- 
viduals as persons. But it must be an- 
swered in the light of the indisputable fact 
that Negroes are segregating themselves and 
are being segregated into an ethnic group. 
I shall presently return to this matter and 
attempt to show that American history 
makes it plain that an ethnic group is not 
necessarily antagonistic to the development 
of the individual. At present I wish only to 
emphasize the fact that the so-called Negro 
problem is not unique in the development of 
our American social order. It has its own 
peculiar difficulties, but it is not unsolvable, 



86 THE VALIDITY OF 

provided it is answered in the terms of our 
experience. 

What is true in the ease of the Negroes 
is true, although less markedly, of other na- 
tionalities, who in America have tended to 
segregate. Of course, the case of the Negro 
is particularly difficult because the color 
question intensifies the racial consciousness. 
The same is true of the relatively small 
group of Japanese and Chinese. But who- 
ever is acquainted with the structure of our 
cities laiows that the ethnic lines are not to 
be ignored. Movement of nationahties is 
not toward dissipating the members in a 
city, but to maintain an almost clannish 
unity of habits. 

IV 

The dangers in this situation cannot be ig- 
nored. Some possible offsets I shall con- 
sider in my last lecture. I wish now only to 
call attention to the historical bearing of this 
ethnic grouping on the ideal of individual- 
ism. 

A study of the ethnographic distribution 
in the United States will show that the seg- 
regation of nationahties has always ex- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 87 

isted. The original colonists, of course, 
were largely of English stock, but there were 
also settlements of Swedes, Germans, 
French, and Dutch, each of which main- 
tained a certain integrity of life. To this 
day it is possible to trace in the older sec- 
tions of the country these ethnic strains. Nor 
has the Anglo-Saxon, any more than other 
nationalities, practiced exogamy. Marriages 
have taken place within each ethnic group. 
So far is it from being true that the indi- 
vidualism in America means universal dis- 
tribution of individuals, a melange of disin- 
tegrated nationalities. 

The individual has developed throughout 
our history within ethnic groups which have 
persisted generation after generation. But 
he has also transcended them. While he has 
had ties binding him to people of kindred 
blood, the forces of business, education, phil- 
anthropy, reform, and to some extent the 
church, have been centrifugal. Within the 
individual atom there have been negative 
and positive forces making toward a great 
variety of combinations. Ethnic groups 
have not made individuahsm in America 
tantamount to isolation. The individual can 



88 THE VALIDITY OF 

continue to have a large number of social 
contacts. Partnership in a number of groups 
will tend in the future as in the past to offset 
the solidarity of any one group. Living thus 
with a variety of interests, the individual has 
found and can continue to find limitations 
set by one set of relations offset by experience 
in quite different groupings. In other words, 
the individualism developed in and by Amer- 
ica is far from being that of the repellant 
atom or the oversensitive soul oppressed by 
spiritual loneliness. It is social and pro- 
ductive of democracy. 



In the furtherance of this ideal there has 
been developed what might be called the 
American technique of democracy, in no 
small degree inherited from our Enghsh 
forbears. What is this technique? 

First: the democratizing of a right seen 
to have become a monopolized privilege of a 
group. This takes place at the point of ten- 
sion and does not presuppose a prior reor- 
ganization of the social order. Thus, for 
example, it was in the case of suffrage. The 
institutions of the country were not de- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 89 

stroyed in order to give votes to slaves and 
later to women. Such persons were simply- 
treated like those who already possessed the 
suffrage and the class of unprivileged in this 
respect disappeared. 

Second: the readjustment of the social 
order to the new conditions set by the de- 
mocratizing of rights at tension points. As 
the eruption of a volcano leads to changes 
of the earth's surface over a wide area, so 
the establishment of a new right is followed 
in America by gradual readjustments within 
the great hinterland of the social order. To 
theorists and radicals this seems mere oppor- 
tunism. To the historical student of society 
it is healthy evolution, assuring the main- 
tenance of order during periods of transi- 
tion. It is the opposite of revolution with 
its destruction of institutions and its after- 
math of misery. 

Third: the development of a community 
of interest on the part of individuals in fields 
which are not those of a single group. In- 
dividuals of one economic or ethnic group 
meet with individuals of other similar groups 
for the development of some phase of social 
welfare which is neither economic nor ethnic. 



90 THE VALIDITY OF 

In order that such a community of interest 
may develop, American life has always 
abounded in variety of group interest due to 
the voluntary association of individuals. 
Self-reliant men with a variety of interests 
live together in some way which does not 
subject them one to another. Naturally in an 
actual human society it is not to be expected 
that such conditions will be perfectly real- 
ized. Economic, social, family, ecclesiasti- 
cal restraints may serve to repress the in- 
dividual, but the fact that we disapprove of 
such oppression is in itself testimony to in- 
dividualism as our ideal. For the further- 
ance of this ideal and its expression in actual 
social relationships American democracy 
I was born. Indeed, democracy in America 
might almost be defined as the organization 
of society with such political and social in- 
stitutions as permit free and equal individ- 
uals to develop their personal life through 
participation in an indefinite number of so- 
cial groups. 

Thus the very process of the extension of 
rights is in itself an ideal. We believe it can 
be trusted. We trust the leavening power of 
any advance toward larger justice. Social 



AMERICAN IDEALS 91 

change we therefore do not fear because we 
have faith in the penetrating power of a new 
ideal and its inevitable consequents in a 
democracy. In the new conditions thus es- 
tablished the individual gains new liberty 
and opportunity. 

It is to this technique we look for the pres- 
ervation of America from that evil genius of 
abstract political logic, the Great Individual 
of a social class. Social relations are in- 
dispensable, but social solidarity is not the 
goal of healthy social process. Class con- 
trol means the death of the free individual. 
Social hfe is a noble servant but a terrible 
master. Atomistic, anarchic individualism 
we have never sought. Group interests have 
always been ours. But our institutions have 
been environment, not ends. They make life 
richer and freer, not more uniform. The 
problem of class solidarity can be answered 
aright only as a way is found by which free 
individuals can live together without subjec- 
tion and without denial of the right to exploit 
social opportunity. Without some group- 
authority, individualism becomes an- 
archy; without individualism group -author- 
ity means tyranny of lord or class. Democ- 



92 THE VALIDITY OF 

racy is the device by which America has 
made possible the socializing of rights, the 
subjection of group-organization to the serv- 
ice of the individual, and the maintenance of 
order. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 93 

LECTURE III 
DEMOCRACY 

If the free individual possessed of po- 
litical, religious and social liberty is the atom 
of our American system, democracy is its 
molecule. To this second American ideal 
we shall now give our attention. 

Democracy has been given new impor- 
tance in the last few years. We fought a war 
to make the world safe for democracy. We 
have been told that the evils of democracy 
can be cured by more democracy and when 
one wishes to cap the cUmax of some po- 
litical oration, he praises democracy. Far 
be it from one who would apprize ideals to 
belittle this indiscriminate use of a term 
which has so many meanings. But he who 
would understand the democracy of Amer- 
ica must clear his mind once and for all of 
some of the interpretations which have been 
given the term. 

I 

To appreciate the real significance of 
American democracy, it is well to bear in 



94 THE VALIDITY OF 

mind that there never have been any more 
democratic institutions than those now in 
the world. And this is true even though by 
a study of the dictionary one arrives at a 
definition of the term "democracy" not in 
accord with the actual situation we find in 
our country. As a matter of fact, the 
fathers of our Constitution were not inter- 
ested in the abstract questions of govern- 
ment. Although innumerable writers from 
1776 to 1800 adopted such classical names 
as Cato, Gracchus, unlike their French con- 
temporaries they were not obsessed with 
classicism. What they wanted were very 
concrete things — self-government and sufii- 
cient unity between the colonies to prevent 
internecine war and social disorder. As 
Theophilus Parsons said in 1787, they were 
not concerned with social adjustment or re- 
constructions, but with union. They were 
not inventing popular government, they 
were adjusting institutions and pohtical ex- 
perience to the new conditions which had de- 
veloped in nearly two centuries' life on a new 
continent. Individuahsm was to be made 
cooperative; a more powerful government 
was to preserve existing governments with- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 95 

out trenching on the life of the citizens. In 
the minds of the fathers that government 
was best which governed least. Thus Amer- 
ican democracy in seeking to prevent the 
estabhshment of conditions all but universal 
in the older States put few restraints upon 
individual initiative in state, church, com- 
merce, and school. Therein appears the uni- 
versal law that a socialized ideal finds ex- 
pression in those institutions and customs in 
which efficiency has already been gained. 
Liberty in America, unlike liberty in 
France, never sought to protect itself by 
mihtary conquests. It was the difference 
between George Washington indignantly 
refusing to be king, and Napoleon Bona- 
parte seeking to bring liberties to a reor- 
ganized Europe through an empire built up 
by war. 

The American colonies continued that 
phase of English constitutional development 
represented by the Whig Party. In the 
eighteenth century the government of Eng- 
land had fallen into the hands of a German 
family and into the hands of a king, George 
III, under whom English Tories undertook 
to force upon American colonists theories 



96 THE VALIDITY OF 

of government which were being combated 
by statesmen like Edmund Burke. They 
sought to compel EngUshmen on this side of 
the water to yield to anti-English concep- 
tions of royal and Parhamentary preroga- 
tives. Englishmen in the American colonies 
refused to submit, and there ensued on the 
soil of America a struggle which saved lib- 
eralism not only on this side of the Atlantic, 
but in England itself. When England thus 
made its contribution to the history of de- 
mocracy, it Uttle thought that there would 
appear on American soil a conception of 
citizenship more extensive and more ideal 
than that which existed at home. But when 
the American colonies organized themselves 
into a Confederation, and later into the 
United States of America, they extended the 
rights of Englishmen into the rights of men. 
In that act the United States made its own 
contribution to the development of the state 
and of democracy. 

In the establishment of the new nation the 
fathers not only made the rights of individ- 
uals paramount in government, but they 
made the people exercising those rights the 
state. Thereby they instituted a new con- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 97 

ception of the state. On the continent of 
Europe the government — the regierung — 
was the state, and the state was not respon- 
sible to those it governed. In the United 
States of America the state and the gov- 
erned were the same. Nor were Americans 
even then content. Those two pohtical steps 
would have marked an epoch; but we did 
more than that. We offered citizenship, 
which involved the right of being the gov- 
ernor of oneself, to all the world. Other na- 
tions had offered to the oppressed of other 
peoples the rights and privileges of asylum. 
England had done this for the Huguenots, 
Prussia had done it for the Jews. But rights 
of asylum are by no means identical with 
citizenship, much less with government it- 
self. In offering this citizenship to the 
world the United States took a step of which 
men had hardly dreamed. I fancy the fore- 
most of the fathers could not have imagined 
it would carry America to its present po- 
litical situation. For thereby came nation- 
wide representative democracy — not a theo- 
retically developed democracy, it is true, but 
a germinal conception which opened govern- 
ment and office to every citizen. 



98 THE VALIDITY OF 

Popular government in the early stages of 
the American nation meant the right of 
people to choose their representatives to 
form a government. The town meeting has 
sometimes been used by theoretical demo- 
crats as a model for national life. My guess 
is that such critics of our theory of govern- 
ment never lived under a town meeting. For 
if there is anything that characterizes town 
meetings, it is the election of selectmen to 
conduct affairs for the ensuing year. The 
democratic ideal so far as it actually exists 
in America has been one of representation 
rather than of continuous voting. All per- 
sons are equal in that they have the right of 
participating in the election of a representa- 
tive government. When it came to the or- 
ganization of the United States the framers 
of the Constitution took a step forward 
which was to be of far more significance than 
they could have realized. Instead of the 
Constitution's being adopted by the various 
Legislatures, which might have limited de- 
mocracy to the confederation of sovereign 
States, it was adopted by the people them- 
selves through conventions. By the Con- 
stitution, also, every individual comes in con- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 99 

tact with a succession of governments which 
he has himself helped to elect — the local, 
county, State, the federal. Thus the rights 
of the individual are preserved and Amer- 
ican democracy is seen to be what it really 
is — a group of institutions, laws, and au- 
thorities which make it possible for citizens 
possessing an equahty of rights to live to- 
gether without disorder ; or more briefly, the 
ideal of American democracy is not a theo- 
retical participation of all the people in all 
political activities all the time, but, rather, 
an equality of opportunity for each individ- 
ual in all phases of social life to share in de- 
termining his government. 

During recent years there has emerged a 
group of writers who are apparently indif- 
ferent to the historical fact that the United 
States is not a democracy in the full theoret- 
ical sense, but is a republic possessing a rep- 
resentative government. Attempts have 
been made to increase the direct responsibil- 
ity of the people by the establishment of the 
initiative, the referendum, and the recall, but 
it seems to be a general opinion that these de- 
vices have failed to accomplish fully what 
it was hoped they would accomplish. The 



100 THE VALIDITY OF 

character of public officials has not mate- 
rially changed, and the repeated call to the 
polls has tended to diminish the actual num- 
ber of voters. A representative government 
needs some sort of check in the form of a 
referendum, but the experience we have had 
makes it plain that government cannot 
fundamentally be by referendum. 

In America sovereignty lies with the peo- 
ple. Its representatives in the government 
do not originate power but have the right to 
use it within limits set by law. In the larger 
governmental system, the Federal govern- 
ment, this basic principle of representation 
is still further developed. Individuals elect 
the federal as truly as the local government. 
By this means our idea of democracy is pro- 
tected from injury by the class ideals so 
easily evoked. The opinion of some people 
seems to be that because they belong to the 
nation they belong to the government; that 
they have a right therefore to choose what 
laws they shall obey and when. Their atti- 
tude reminds me of the old Frenchwoman at 
the time of the Revolution. She was sitting 
at the door of the meeting place of the Con- 
vention. A member of the Girondin party 



AMERICAN IDEALS 101 

was about to pass by her without salutation, 
whereupon she seized him by the hair of his 
head, pulled his head back and forth, shout- 
ing, "Bow your head to the sovereign peo- 
ple!" But in American democracy the sov- 
ereign people obey those to whom it 
delegates the exercise of sovereignty. 

This conception of a social technique by 
which free people can live together without 
subjection one to another, in the nature of 
the case involves a respect for law. Here 
we find a most difficult element in the mod- 
ern operations of democracy. We have so 
many representative governments in town, 
county, State, and nation that the volume of 
law to be obeyed passes our knowledge. 
Furthermore, a behef on the part of many 
good people that a reform can be effected 
simply by legislation has served to increase 
the distemper of mind. In consequence 
there has grown up a dangerous habit of dis- 
crimination in our attitude toward law. In- 
dividuals frankly claim the right to deter- 
mine whether or not they approve of a law 
before they obey it. Such an attitude of 
mind is clearly dangerous to the very theory 
of our democracy. The excessive number of 



102 THE VALIDITY OF 

laws cannot safely be permitted to lead to a 
disregard of law as the expression of the 
delegated sovereignty of the people. Per- 
haps here more than anywhere else is it pos- 
sible for us to make a definite appeal to in- 
telligent citizens. No citizen can safely ac- 
quire the habit of choosing which laws he 
shall obey. Of course he has the right to 
become a revolutionist, but he cannot be a 
revolutionist and a law-abiding citizen at the 
same time. If he wishes to be a revolution- 
ist, he must expect to take the consequences ; 
but if he does not expect to be a revolution- 
ist, he must obey the laws. To do otherwise 
would be to imperil the very structure upon 
which property and other rights depend. It 
is hard to see how respectable citizens who 
deliberately choose to break the laws cover- 
ing the manufacture, sale, and transporta- 
tion of liquor can hope for continued obedi- 
ence to other laws which they want observed. 
I am not so foolish as to say that the United 
States has become lawless, but I think it true 
that while substantial citizens demand the 
enforcement of law, they frequently prefer 
that obedience to law should be rendered by 
others rather than by themselves. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 103 

At this point we face a real test of the 
validity of our ideal of a democracy governed 
by representatives with delegated powers. 
And such a test is also one of the individual. 
Unless our state is composed of law-abiding 
citizens, ready to practice self-control in 
loyal obedience to an established govern- 
ment, it will face the alternative of absolut- 
ism or anarchy. No democracy can survive 
the disrespect of its citizens. 

Here again one's faith in our institutions 
rests upon the history of social attitudes. 
The development of our democracy has not 
been without similar crises. But our ideal- 
ism and the hatred of disloyalty to our insti- 
tutions have always checked anarchy. With 
this history in mind no lover of his country 
can despair in the face of to-day's problems. 
The effervescence of lawlessness will pass. 
Not only the government at Washington but 
the inner life of democracy still lives and 
progresses. 

Such faith is justified because American 
conceptions of the state and society are born 
of experience and not of theory. In fact, 
one cannot go far astray in saying that what 
we call abstract rights to be found in so many 



104. THE VALIDITY OF 

Declarations are really the generalization of 
certain concrete rights enjoyed by English- 
men at home and in the colonies. But these 
rights never involved the abolition of gov- 
ernmental oversight or administration. 
Laws made by the representatives of the 
people were to be obeyed. 

II 

Yet American democracy has not always 
been quite the same. It has developed its 
own inner powers of self -direction. Two 
periods are easily distinguished. The first 
was that in which leadership and govern- 
ment were in the hands of recognized leaders. 
For a generation, as political parties began 
to form themselves, there was a struggle be- 
tween what might be called the notables of 
society and the great masses. One can see 
the various periods in the process by which 
the conception of democracy, as we now have 
it, emerged. Different points of view can be 
seen in the attitude of Winthrop and Cotton 
as opposed to that of Hooker, even in the 
seventeenth century, Connecticut certainly 
had a more democratic attitude toward life 
and government than had the Puritans of 



AMERICAN IDEALS 105 

Massachusetts Bay. In the South, in addi- 
tion to slaves, the growing population was 
roughly divided into three classes: the first 
families, the small farmers, and the landless 
men. The first families were supposed to 
control the state. The people who lived on 
their small frontier farms were supposed to 
be thankful for the care bestowed upon pub- 
lic affairs by the wealthy and educated, 
whose names had become synonymous with 
colonial history. However much we may 
judge that Professor Beard has over-esti- 
mated the economic elements in the origin of 
our Constitution, it is beyond dispute that 
from 1760 until the adoption of the Consti- 
tution in 1789 there was in the entire range 
of colonies a persistent rivalry and in many 
cases open hostility between people who were 
opening up the new land on the western fron- 
tier from New Hampshire to Georgia, and 
the commercial and the planter groups 
nearer tidewater. The forefathers of the re- 
public, with the exception of Patrick Henry 
and one or two others, belonged to this quasi- 
aristocratic group. There were, of course, 
elections of officers by the duly constituted 
voters, but, as in England, the members of 



106 THE VALIDITY OF 

significant families and those who for other 
reason had social prestige were naturally 
chosen for office and responsibility. The hst 
of signers of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, as well as members of the Constitu- 
tional Convention, is a sort of American 
peerage. "It is a hst of the demigods," said 
Jefferson when he read the names of the 
signers of the call for that Convention. 
When the federal government was estab- 
lished in 1789, the same situation is to be 
found. Hamilton was frankly distrustful of 
the people and Washington seems to have 
had some sympathy with that distrust. The 
Constitution was so organized that the peo- 
ple could not elect the President directly 
but were to elect those who, after careful 
consideration, would select the best avail- 
able person. Thus liberty was almost tanta- 
mount to the right of the masses to elect their 
officials but not, according to practice, from 
their own number. 

And yet during the very period of the in- 
cubation of the Constitution, there were 
forces developing which were to produce a 
very different party spirit and become a new 
force in the American society. I do not re- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 107 

fer so much to the philosophical democracy 
of Thomas Jefferson, important as that was. 
He was a great expounder of natural rights 
and liberty, but despite this academic, phil- 
osophical interest, he seems to me to have be- 
longed to that group of notables who felt 
that the control of government naturally be- 
longed in their hands as the proper repre- 
sentatives of the masses, who on the one side 
he idealized and on the other side treated as 
equal in their inferiority. 

The break with this aristocratic democ- 
racy came with the expansion of the frontier. 
There men found not only individualism but 
a self-confidence which did not brook the 
idea that they must let notable families carry 
on affairs. To a very large extent this new 
attitude, which was not that of revolt but, 
rather, of self-reliance, was the outcome of 
new rehgious currents. To judge from con- 
temporary records the religious life of New 
England and, in fact, the whole Atlantic 
seaboard, was one of eminently conventional 
respectability. I do not think colonial morals 
were higher than to-day, but they were dif- 
ferent. There was, one might say, a larger 
sense of propriety. On the frontier, how- 



108 THE VALIDITY OF 

ever, religion took on a very much less con- 
ventional and more direct sort of character. 
New Light preachers, Methodist itinerants, 
Baptist evangelists preached a sort of gos- 
pel that was not adjusted to colonial meet- 
ing houses and the f ormaUties of the church. 
They preached in log cabins, under the trees, 
wherever they could get a crowd together. 
Their preaching was not in the cunningly de- 
vised words of Harvard College and Yale 
College, or even in those of the College of 
New Jersey at Princeton. They preached, 
rather, the worth of the human soul, the dan- 
gers that beset it, and the possibility of im- 
mediate access to God. Apparently, they 
never recognized anything like distinction 
in social standing. People were all poor, 
pitting themselves against not a too kindly 
nature, and the little churches which sprang 
up all along the western frontier from New 
York to North Carolina, were filled with the 
belief of their own importance and the per- 
sonal worth of their members. They fur- 
nished the spiritual motives for the social 
order that was developing along the frontier. 
Patrick Henry in Virginia was its mouth- 
piece and Jefferson in no small degree was 



AMERICAN IDEALS 109 

its product. But it took another generation 
for this popular movement with its new con- 
sciousness and self-reliance to be sufficiently 
widespread and relieved from the first hand- 
to-hand struggle with nature, to become a 
real power. 

Then began the second period in the his- 
tory of American democracy. It was not 
appreciated by the old leaders of the coun- 
try. When popular democracy triumphed 
in the election of Andrew Jackson as Presi- 
dent a shudder ran through the nation. To 
the notable famihes and pohtical leaders of 
the Atlantic seaboard such a transfer of 
power seemed almost a revolution. But the 
new democracy was true to its inheritance, 
and never for an instant undertook to neg- 
lect the Constitution or to attack those 
fundamental rights which the development 
of colonies had made so complete. From 
Jackson's time on, an accredited leader has 
usually been chosen by those whom he is to 
lead from their own number and not from 
some notable family. 

And here we notice a remarkable fact. 
American democracy since the days of An- 
drew Jackson has not followed inherited 



110 THE VALIDITY OF 

leadership. It has produced its own leaders. 
It has had, so to speak, no General Staff. 
It has been under the guidance of noncom- 
missioned officers who have been close 
enough to their squads of citizens to know 
their will and express it. Herein American 
democracy has differed from the Enghsh, 
with its consolidated race and history. We 
have no great families who assume leadership 
almost by heredity. It is only in rare cases 
that a father's name is of any particular 
service to a young man entering politics. 
The leaders of democracy work their way up 
through democracy, partaking of its weak- 
nesses as well as of its strength. American 
democracy has been a self-conscious mass 
movement, awakened to mass decisions by 
political campaigns. It has flowed around 
obstacles like a huge amoeba. Such conduct 
seems irrational to poHtical theorists who 
still think a democracy must wait for guid- 
ance from without. They lament the lack 
of leaders ; they pray for leaders ; every now 
and then they undertake to be leaders them- 
selves. But in this attitude they are anach- 
ronistic, the contemporaries of the fathers 
rather than of the children. They fail to see 



AMERICAN IDEALS 111 

and trust the extraordinary power of Amer- 
ican democracy to produce its leaders from 
its own tendencies and ideals. In America 
men become leaders unwittingly. Better 
than somebody else they do something a pre- 
cinct, a party, a nation wants done. Men 
gather about them as long as this represent- 
ative efficiency continues. When it ceases, 
the people turn to others who can organize 
new tendencies, and retire the outgrown 
leaders of their making to whatever fate 
awaits them. The process is relentless, but 
it is the hope of our land. We follow men 
we have produced. Our ideaKsm is of our 
own begetting, not of enforced adoption. 

This self-directing democracy has always ' 
been true to the fundamental conception of 
the government. That is the reassuring fact. 
Never has it undertaken to be unconstitu- 
tional. In fact, the only serious attempts 
made upon ideals embodied in the Constitu- 
tion have been by what might be called the 
privileged classes. Such, for example, were 
the abortive attempts of the landed gentry of 
Kentucky and Virginia in 1798, of the com- 
mercial classes of New England at the time 
of the Embargo Act in 1814, and of South 



112 THE VALIDITY OF 

Carolina, in 1832, where an attempt was 
made to nullify the federal tariff. But the 
mass-sense of the nation would have none of 
such policies. 

Take, for instance, the attitude of the 
country to revolutionary France. It can be 
easily understood why the American people 
sympathized greatly with the French when 
they deposed Louis XVI and established a 
republic. The American people began to 
establish Jacobin clubs and to profess wild 
enthusiasm when in 1793 France declared 
war against Great Britain. In fact, the situ- 
ation which followed the overthrow of the 
Czar by Russian revolutionists was not un- 
like that which followed the triumph of the 
Jacobins in the Convention. The mission of 
Mr. Martens as emissary of the Bolshevik 
movement may serve to interpret the early 
days of our national life. The French revo- 
lutionists attempted to capitahze this Amer- 
ican sympathy. A gentleman by the name 
of Genet was sent as minister to the United 
States, and with the sublime superiority 
which revolutionists have to existing laws 
wherever found, he proceeded to fit out 
privateers. Washington promptly issued a 



AMERICAN IDEALS 113 

proclamation of neutrality, and the next 
year Congress passed a Neutrality Act. 
Whereupon Citizen Genet appealed to the 
people as against their government. This, 
of course, was little more than an attempt to 
spread the principles of revolution in Amer- 
ica. He had, of course, his hot-headed fol- 
lowers, just as Bolsheviks have their hot- 
headed followers to-day, but the Amer- 
ican people were not to be stampeded into 
unconstitutional hysteria, and Citizen Genet, 
recalled by his government, retreated to an 
American marriage and the comforts of an 
American home. 

Again and again in the history of our 
country have attempts been made to stam- 
pede our democracy away from its consti- 
tutional expression. Very frequently such 
efforts have taken the form of some type of 
agitation — anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese or 
anti-Japanese — by which it has been hoped 
to excite the people to override the govern- 
ment. In every case they have failed and 
American democracy has left to its delegated 
representatives the decisions which have to 
be made. That public opinion has swayed 
those decisions goes without saying. It 



114 THE VALIDITY OF 

would have been unfortunate if this had not 
been the case, but until very recent days de- 
mocracy has not regarded itself as possessing 
direct power of action. Even in the case of 
later developments in States where there has 
been a recall as well as referendum and in- 
itiative, democracy has established through 
its chosen representatives new methods for 
orderly self-expression. 

How different from this actuality is the 
rodomontade with which persons unac- 
quainted with American history, unaccus- 
tomed to dealing with the human element in 
all social action, assail the ears of the ground- 
lings! To listen to some of their exposi- 
tions of democracy is like listening to an 
oration upon quadratic equations. One can 
make a paper constitution as perfect as John 
Locke's constitution for North Carolina, but 
unless in some way it is able to express and 
direct and respond to the national mass 
movement governed by public opinion, 
it will be ineffective. The fact that our con- 
stitution is the product of the same social 
process that produced our democracy is the 
great reason why our democracy has always 
acted constitutionally. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 115 

Doubtless the outstanding illustration of 
this self -directive idealism of the American 
people lies in the great conflict, already men- 
tioned, over slavery. The answer given by 
the Civil War to the attempt to recast the 
original purposes of equality, liberty, and 
union was not simply that of the relative eco- 
nomic strength of geographical sections. It 
was the outcome of the growth of a truly 
American conception of democracy. Not 
only slavery was at stake, but the funda- 
mental conception of the Union as a body 
of individual citizens who elect their repre- 
sentatives from localities and not from eco- 
nomic classes. Had the Southern theory of 
society and of the Union prevailed, our re- 
public would have revived the democracy of 
the Greek states. A capitalistic class would 
have constituted the democracy and have ul- 
timately built a social order upon slaves and 
free men without property and suffrage. 
But such reversion was prevented. 

With the rapid growth of the population, 
the nation entered a new political period. A 
new democracy spelled the end of slavery 
and class control. We have amended our 
Constitution so that our Senators are elected 



116 THE VALIDITY OF 

by the people instead of by the Legislatures, 
and despite the fact that it was instituted for 
another purpose, our electoral college has 
only seldom failed to reflect the will of a 
popular majority. 

This development has a deeper signifi- 
cance than the immediate relationship of the 
people with the federal government. It has 
solidified a political conception. While na- 
tions possessing the class system have recog- 
nized a democracy based on classes, Amer- 
icanism has as its political essence a union of 
inseparable states which is at the same time 
a democracy made up of free men and 
women. Every attempt at a different sort 
of political structure, whether it be in Mas- 
sachusetts Bay or in the South, has been 
wiped away. 

Here is a definite and distinct political 
achievement born of the undisguised strug- 
gle with its opposite. It is our contribution 
to liberty. On the worth and permanence 
of such a democracy we stake our pohtical 
existence. 

Democracy of this American type is a 
great shock absorber. Within it, as within 
an ocean, antagonistic forces find themselves 



AMERICAN IDEALS 117 

stopped from producing results foretold by 
the man who deals with ideas rather than 
folks. The human element is one contribu- 
tion of American history to political ideal- 
ism. Social forces in the United States are 
not working out their result in a vacuum but 
in the midst of a social order experienced in 
the assimilation and restraint of conflicting 
groups. At the risk of excessive repetition, 
I would again point out that Continental 
Europe has always differed from America 
in that it has recognized social classes as 
units in politics and social adjustments. 
Each marked pohtical change on the Con- 
tinent has of necessity been a violent revo- 
lution in which one of these classes sought to 
dispossess the other and reign in its stead. 
Russia at the present time is suffering from 
a reversed autocracy. The workingmen are 
the autocrats and the autocrats are the work- 
ingmen. The effect of such revolution is i 
represented by a new class of masters and a | 
new class of servants. Individuals count no 1 
more than under the Czar. If there had been 
in Russia anything corresponding to our 
American citizenship accustomed to politi- 
cal patience, the estabhshment of a Russian 



118 THE VALIDITY OF 

republic might have been accomplished in a 
much less sanguinary fashion. 

It is to this American democracy, born of 
actual experiences in the extension of ideals, 
that we can confidently look for establishing 
safe conditions for social reconstruction. 
The American people is capable of extraor- 
dinary surface agitation, but the deep cur- 
rent of its life is that of a representative de- 
mocracy. However elusive may be "the pub- 
lic," it includes all the parties engaged in 
the economic struggle as truly as those 
who are not. Our government represents 
individuals. The nearest approach to the 
class representation of the soviet system is 
the organized lobby. And the combination 
of lobby and geographical representation is 
the most successful experiment thus far 
made in adjusting class interests to national 
well-being. To make classes into poUtical 
masters is to revert to a theory the nineteenth 
century tried and repudiated. We are a de- 
mocracy of individuals, not of economic 
classes. 

The constitutional struggles of the nine- 
teenth century show plainly the wholesome 
influence of the national mind. It constitutes 



AMERICAN IDEALS 119 

an atmosphere in the midst of which Con- 
tinental poHtical theories have never flom^- 
ished. To educate faith in our democracy- 
is our new obhgation. Citizenship must in- J 
elude the acceptance of the American con-] 
victions as to the state and society. Educa- 
tion cannot undertake a more imperative 
task than the introduction of each new gen- 
eration of native-born Americans, as well as 
immigrants from an alien social order, into 
that which is genuinely American. Such in- 
troduction is the great task of every educa- 
tional institution. 

The permanence of these democratic 
ideals, I believe, is certain, but there still re- 
mains the question as to whether it can be 
assured without struggle. The history of 
the nineteenth century suggests caution as 
to too-ready optimism, but I venture to say 
that in an educational process of such vast 
importance the American people will not re- 
pudiate its past. We are not engaged in a 
political debate. We are in deadly earnest. 
Freedom of speech we must unquestionably 
preserve. Ideas cannot be answered by po- 
licemen's clubs. If there are abuses, let us 
be told them. But freedom of speech does 



120 THE VALIDITY OF 

not mean loose talk and unrestrained agita- 
tion to revolution. We cannot play as we 
wage a life-and-death struggle between two 
conceptions of the state. If such a struggle 
is not to result in civil war, as may God for- 
bid, it will be because the American people 
are sufficiently alive to the reaUty of the is- 
sue as not to mistake sentimentahty for lib- 
erty. Freedom does not include the duty of 
American democracy to permit conspiracy 
against its constitutional foundations. That 
was settled in the Civil War. The United 
States emerged from that terrible struggle 
not because of Garrison's condenmation of 
the Constitution as a "covenant with death 
and an agreement with hell," but because of 
the great volume of human interest and sac- 
rifice which determined that the Constitution 
should be preserved and that individualism 
should not be replaced by a class govern- 
ment. When to-day men attack our form of 
government and the Constitution and our 
democracy, it is well to bear in mind that a 
nation, hke an individual, has a perfect right 
to defend itself. There is nothing in Amer- 
ican history to argue that democracy means 
unlimited opportunity for pohtical suicide. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 121 

If men do not like American democracy as 
it exists to-day under the Constitution, it is 
possible for them to modify it by constitu- 
tional methods. If men do not like Amer- 
ican democracy and attempt to change it by 
appeal to force, they may very properly ex- 
pect that, as in 1861, the country will see to 
it that their plans for revolution will be 
checked. If ahens wish to attack the consti- 
tutional institutions of a nation to which they 
do not belong, they have no right to complain •, 
if that nation after preserving its political 
unity and democracy by its own blood, sends 
them and their Utopias back to lands where 
Utopias seem greatly needed. American 
democracy is no child of political dilettanti 
and does not hold itself as the sport of a 
world madness. 

If our democracy is self-directing, if it 
does not wait for self-appointed leaders, if 
it must and can act for itself, if it is too great 
for any single leader, it must be possessed of 
a unity of spirit. And this spirit America 
has. A Bismarck can make an empire, but 
a democracy is its own maker. It will not 
act until it acts in accordance with its own 
inner spirit. It has mouthpieces and inter- 



122 THE VALIDITY OF 

preters, but it bows to no master. America 
is its own inner mentor. Out from free dis- 
cussion comes its programs; from its own 
spirit comes its prophets; from its education 
comes its leaders. We look to our democracy 
to make safe its own future by educating its 
mighty present. 

Standing as we do at the beginning of a 
new epoch, already experiencing the antag- 
onism of conflicting groups and ideals, we 
are in truth successors to those who made the 
democracy we have inherited. We honor 
them as fathers and teachers, but our noblest 
loyalty will be shown in our adherence to the 
great ideals of individuality, liberty, union, 
and democracy for which they shed their 
blood. Their spirit hves in our hopes, and 
their experience in our institutions. If they 
could speak to us they would bid us avoid 
their mistakes, but not to fear to carry fur- 
ther their accomplishments. They have be- 
queathed us a democracy of individuals. It 
is ours to make it a democracy of brothers. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 123 

LECTURE IV 

THE WRITTEN CONSTITUTION 

One of the most significant contributions 
made by American political experience to 
modern life is the written Constitution. If 
we go back to 1776, we shall discover a world 
not only httle concerned about constitutional 
monarchy, but without any serious attempt 
at organizing the principles of govermnent 
into a written instrument. Great Britain 
had then, as now, an unwritten constitution 
made up of the various acts of Parliament 
and decisions of courts controlled by general 
rights formulated in such documents as 
Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, and 
the Bill of Rights. But no country, if we 
make pgssible exception of Holland, had 
attempted to reduce to a written statement 
the general principles upon which states were 
to be founded and to which citizens and gov- 
ernments were to conform. I do not need to 
remind you that, despite certain recent ten- 
dencies, a constitution differs markedly from 
a statute in that it delimits the field within 
which statutes must be made. It organizes 



124 THE VALIDITY OF 

the general principles to which the entire 
state must conform and does not attempt to 
deal with specific matters. In a sense it may 
be said to be a formal expression of what a 
nation demands its government shall regard 
as its field of action. It thus protects the 
freedom of the individual by limiting ex- 
pressly the powers of government. Demo- 
cratic government in accord with a written 
constitution adopted by individual citizens 
is the third of our great American ideals. 



This ideal, like individualism and democ- 
racy, was the product of a long experience 
in politics. Like them, too, it is rooted in 
English history. 

With the exception of England, the seven- 
teenth century resigned itself to absolute 
monarchy. According to the piety of the 
monarch, this absolutism was believed to be 
founded upon the divine rights of kings. 
Louis XIV was the brilliant representative 
of this conception of the state. Whether he 
actually used the famous expression, 
"L'etat, c'est moir may be left to the mercy 
of doctors' theses, but the saying expresses 



AMERICAN IDEALS 125 

precise political fact. The Stuarts under- 
took to carry forward this same conception 
of the state in England, but with disastrous 
results to Charles I and James II. The 
spirit of Protestantism is increasingly hos- 
tile to any type of irresponsible control, and 
when, as in England, this impatience is 
joined to Scotch Presbyterianism, results 
are very apt to follow. True, the Civil War 
in England did not result in the abolition of 
the monarchy or in the establishment of a 
government in any sense comparable with 
the EngHsh democracy of to-day. None the 
less, in the seventeenth century, constitu- 
tional government was to gain impetus. For 
English absolutism in the seventeenth cen- 
tury was one cause of the great migration 
of well-to-do Englishmen to America. 

The Puritans who settled in Massachu- 
setts and in Connecticut were of substantial 
means and with a good cultural background. 
They brought to the task of pioneering edu- 
cational ideals as well as practical experi- 
ence in business, church, and politics. They 
belonged to a much larger party of English- 
men who favored a responsible government. 
The party struggles of the seventeenth and 



126 THE VALIDITY OF 

eighteenth centuries make it plain that great 
bodies of Englishmen who did not migrate 
were the equals of the colonists in devotion 
to political liberty and constitutional gov- 
ernment. The conditions, however, which 
were set up in colonial life hastened the de- 
velopment of pohtical ideals which the so- 
cial structure and inertia of the mother coun- 
try made difficult. 

Particularly is this true in the case of con- 
stitution making. Men living together un- 
der new conditions seem to turn naturally to 
written compacts rather than to gentlemen's 
agreements. Circumstances in which our 
forefathers found themselves forced ap- 
proval of this method, but, hke so many other 
things in our history, the written Constitu- 
tion was not their out-and-out invention. 
They had certain precedents which must 
always have suggested development. First 
and foremost, there was of course Magna 
Carta, with which every Englishman was fa- 
mihar and the sentences of which were the 
very bulwark of Enghsh hberties. But 
there were other documents with which the 
American Constitution makers of the eigh- 
teenth century were familiar. There was. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 127 

for instance, the Petition of Rights of 1628 
— ^mostly concerned with mihtary oppres- 
sion, but also providing that there should be 
no imprisonment except upon a specific 
charge. Other Petitions were so important 
as to be among the foundations of the mod- 
ern constitutional monarchy of England. 
There was, too, that most interesting Instru- 
ment of Cromwell in which he set forth the 
general plan of government which he hoped 
to develop for the Commonwealth. It never 
had any great influence in English history, 
but it is at least an indication that as early as 
1653 the idea of a written constitution which 
was to be the test of executive and legisla- 
tive action was already in the minds of Eng- 
lishmen. In 1689 William and Mary were 
declared "King and Queen of Great Brit- 
ain, Ireland and France," subject to a Dec- 
laration of Rights which limited royal ab- 
solutism and settled the succession to the 
crown, and at the close of the same year a 
Parliamentary Bill of Rights reaffirmed and 
further limited the conditions contained in 
the earlier act. In 1701, by the Act of Set- 
tlement, the succession of the crown and 
royal powers were still further defined. 



128 THE VALIDITY OF 

But more important for the development 
of the American leaning to a written consti- 
tution were undoubtedly the Charters in ac- 
cordance with which the colonies themselves 
were administered. Every colony had some 
such fundamental instrument fixing its re- 
lation to the crown. In some cases it was an 
express instrument of powers of self-govern- 
ment which the colony could exercise. In 
other cases it was a charter granted to some 
trading company which in turn granted 
rights and prescribed conditions to the col- 
onies. In the course of time, however, these 
charters all emerged from the crown, so that 
self-government under terms stated by a 
written document was familiar to the col- 
onies. The local affairs of the colonies un- 
der these charters were carried on by repre- 
sentative bodies of various names. Thus an- 
other element of the American democracy 
was in process of development. Colonial 
governments were fundamentally constitu- 
tional in germ. 

II 

The Mayflower Compact naturally occurs 
to us as the first of the strictly American an- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 129 

cestors of our many constitutions. And, in- 
deed, it was to prove of very great impor- 
tance — the nearest approach which we have 
to that hypothetical social compact which 
played such a role in the political thought of 
the eighteenth century. Strictly speaking, 
it was not the constitution of a new state but, 
rather, an agreement of individuals to main- 
tain loyalty to their English king and to live 
together under certain conditions. The ef- 
fect of this Compact, drawn by a few 
weather-beaten Pilgrims in the tiny cabin of 
an unbelievably small vessel, was to be felt 
widely throughout the northern migration in 
the later periods. Straight across the conti- 
nent in the latitude of New England, and 
also in some other localities, you will find 
towns established in the way of the Pilgrims. 
The settlers accept an agreement, sign it, 
and live by it. In such political action one 
can see the true nature of our Constitution. 
For, although the small number of persons in 
these new towns permitted each man to sign 
the agreement in the presence of his fellows, 
strictly speaking these compacts were no 
more adopted by the individuals themselves 
than was the Constitution of the United 



130 THE VALIDITY OF 

States. The people, and not the state gov- 
ernment, adopted the Constitution through 
conventions. Thus, in very truth, every man 
who becomes a citizen agrees to Uve by the 
Constitution of the United States. He is 
not dependent upon general ideas as to what 
is right or upon successive legislative acts, 
but upon that conception of government 
which the Constitution of his nation pre- 
scribes and he accepts. 

I call attention to this fact here because 
there is much loose talk abroad which would 
seem to indicate that one has a constitutional 
right to act as if there were no Constitution. 
But such a view is contrary to the very es- 
sence of our national ideal. A constitution 
is not superimposed upon the people any 
more than was the Mayflower Compact. It 
is a general statement as to the rules of the 
game of American citizenship. We can 
change it — but until it is changed, we have 
no right to live contrary to it. 

Long before these town covenants, how- 
ever, what was probably the first real con- 
stitution which America, and possibly the 
world, ever saw appeared in the Organic 
Articles of Connecticut drawn up and 



AMERICAN IDEALS 131 

iopted in 1639. They organize the ideal 
jf a representative government and make 
plain the limitations as well as the powers of 
the state. It is worth noticing, also, that one 
of the most complete expositions of the 
theory of the written Constitution and of the 
state is set forth in a sermon preached by 
Hooker just prior to the adoption of the 
Articles. And I do not need to remind you 
that so thoroughly and prophetically Amer- 
ican was that conception that Connecticut 
saw httle need of changing the provisions of 
this ancient document when it became a 
State of the Union. 

This action of Connecticut was followed in 
1G41 by the Body of Liberties adopted by 
the General Court of Massachusetts, and in 
1643 there was formed the confederation 
known as the United Colonies of New Eng- 
land, with terms also contained in a written 
instrument. 

The conception of a Constitution as a com- 
pact between citizens was given color by the 
philosophy of Locke, which was popular in 
the American colonies. Indeed, he had 
drawn up a Constitution for the Carolinas in 
1669, although it was never adopted and as 



132 THE VALIDITY OF 

a matter of fact did not emphasize his phil- 
osophy. In 1682 a Frame of Government 
was drawn up by WiUiam Penn as a basis 
for organizing his colony. In 1772 the citi- 
zens of Boston resolved that "the common- 
wealth is a body politic or civil society of 
men united together to promote their mutual 
safety and prosperity by their union." An 
examination of the Constitutions of the thir- 
teen colonies will disclose constant repetition 
of this conception of compact. Probably the 
most striking illustrations are the constitu- 
tions of Massachusetts and Virginia. But 
everywhere we get the American conception 
of a constitution as an instrument for codify- 
ing and maintaining the rights of the people 
from the oppression of the government. 
They not only estabhsh representative gov- 
ernment, but limit its employment of its rep- 
resentative powers. 

In some cases these constitutions are pref- 
aced by a Declaration of Rights. We can 
say truthfully that these Declarations of 
Rights are an American improvement upon 
the Bills of Rights and Petitions of Rights 
and even the Declaration of Rights of the 
mother country. They are the outcome al- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 133 

most exclusively of the church life of the 
New England colonies. As I have already- 
pointed out they served as models for the 
Declarations of Rights of the French Revo- 
lution, but their ideahsm is not that of ab- 
stract philosophy. Rather it springs from 
rehgious conviction given direction and con- 
trol by political experience. Whether or not 
these Declarations are prefixed to the various 
constitutions of the States, they are none the 
less involved therein. Such a Declaration 
was prefixed to the Articles of Confedera- 
tion, but in the Constitution of the United 
States was omitted. The first nine amend- 
ments to the Constitution, however, may be 
said to be a statement of rights which had not 
been definitely asserted in the Constitution 
itself. These amendments were adopted 
practically without discussion as expressing 
the ideals which everybody held. The sepa- 
ration of church and state is perhaps the 
most advanced of these rights when com- 
pared with the ecclesiastical situation in 
other countries. The others may all be found 
at least in germ in the constitutional life of 
England itself. 

This simple fact in itself is eloquent of the 



134 THE VALIDITY OF 

entirely practical mood of mind from which 
the American Constitution sprang. It was 
not the charting of an mitraveled sea. It 
was, rather, the projection of well-worn 
paths. ^Miat had worked was to work. 
^Miat experience had favored, experience 
was to carry forward. French reform in 
1789 became revolution in 1792 very largely 
because men inexperienced in constitutional 
government midertook to lay down funda- 
mental general principles from which they 
could deduce a constitution. ^Miile they 
were discussing a Declaration of the Rights 
of Man and the Citizen, hmnan passions 
swept beyond them so that their constitution 
was moribund as soon as it was born. The 
American colonies had practiced rights. 
They did not stop to discuss them until 
after they had focused their experiences in 
an instrument of government. Political the- 
ory was the child of pohtical practice. 

This practical idealism appeared also in 
the discussion which sprang up around the 
Constitution after its adoption. The point 
at issue was not social theory, abstract de- 
mocracy, or, in fact, anything abstract. 
^^Tlat the American people chose was what 



AMERICAN IDEALS 135 

they saw in many cases was the lesser of two 
evils. Any sort of constitution that could 
bring about an actual union between the 
States was better than the anarchy toward 
which the country was drifting. But order 
was to come from delegated powers. The 
American Revolution had been based on the 
behef that Parliament was violating funda- 
mental laws and natural rights. The new 
federal government, as far as possible, was to 
be made incapable of any such unconstitu- 
tional action. 

Thus the task which our constitutional 
forbears faced was unprecedented, but they 
were not without suitable experience. In 
shaping up government by means of a writ- 
ten instrument, the American colonists were 
following a course of action with which they 
were already acquainted and which had al- 
ready justified itself in the protection of the 
rights and liberties of Englishmen. It is 
only what might be expected that, having 
once undertaken to build a government with 
power, the American colonists should be 
anxious lest they should give it too much 
power. Our Constitution is a formulation 
of structural law, a protection of the liberty 



136 THE VALIDITY OF 

which the individual abeady possessed as 
truly as it was the creator of a government. 

Ill 

It has of late been argued that our written 
Constitution is too rigid; that it would be 
better for the American people if it had a 
Constitution susceptible of easier amend- 
ment. "Why," it is asked, "should our an- 
cestors control our action?" Such criticism 
is based largely upon the suiBciency and 
success of the British constitution, which is 
not a written document. In my opinion, 
such criticism, while not without plausibility, 
is unjustified. The various Commonwealths 
which compose the British Empire have all 
adopted written constitutions, and there is 
a fair question as to the precise accuracy of 
the statement that the British constitution is 
beyond documentary control. But quite 
apart from such considerations, the United 
States would certainly have been in chaos 
long ago if it had not possessed a written 
Constitution which could give permanency 
of government to millions of naturalized citi- 
zens unaccustomed to democracy. Herein 
we markedly differ from a homogeneous na- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 137 

tion with the inhibitions and guidance of ex- 
perience like England. Again and again has 
our country been saved from hasty, and what 
might have proved fatal innovations by the 
simple fact that because we have a written 
Constitution changes are not matters of 
opinion and policies but of law. Proposed 
changes to the Constitution already number 
several thousand. Many of these might 
have become operative had it not been for 
the necessary delay which the process of 
amending the Constitution necessitates. 

But such criticism of our Constitution as a 
safeguard of democracy is not widespread. 
In talking with almost any American who is 
not addicted to theoretical politics you will 
discover that he respects the Constitution 
even more than the government. It is the 
Constitution, or, if I may be permitted to 
coin a word, it is the constitutionism that he 
would preserve. He is ready to change the 
Constitution, but it must be changed in ac- 
cordance with its own proviso; and so it has 
really come to pass that the innermost sanc- 
tity of American political life is not ab- 
stract democracy or liberty, but the Consti- 
tution, which makes possible liberty, govern- 



138 THE VALIDITY OF 

ment among equals, and constitutional 
changes without revolution. Foreign critics 
of our institutions usually see this but with- 
out always justly appreciating it. We 
Americans understand it because we see in 
our Constitution something more than a 
theoretical exposition of abstract principles. 
It is the codification of workable idealism de- 
rived from generations of experience. It 
formulates rules for playing on a larger 
scale a game already understood. 

Two facts are suggested by this considera- 
tion of rigidity in our Constitution. In the 
first place, the Constitution, although a doc- 
ument, has in the course of national expan- 
sion become in reality something not alto- 
gether unHke the British constitution. This 
has come about constitutionally by the pas- 
sage of acts by Congress which, although 
widely extending certain grants of power to 
the federal government, have been pro- 
nounced constitutional by the Supreme 
Court of the United States. The judge and 
the legislator have been not only guardians 
but reinterpreters of the Constitution. One 
might almost say that we have remade our 
nation by a broad interpretation of the sen- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 139 

tence giving the federal government con- 
trol of interstate commerce. No one can for 
a moment believe that legislation hke that 
dealing with child labor, pure foods, safety 
devices on freight trains was specifically in 
the minds of the makers of the Constitution. 
But conditions in 1789 gave rise to general 
formulas, capable of varied apphcation. 
Among them was the necessity that the fed- 
eral government rather than that of the sepa- 
rate States should control commerce between 
the States. This organic principle has been 
extended by legislation and judicial decision 
in accordance with its spirit rather than with 
its details. Our actual working Constitu- 
tion has grown with the growth of the na- 
tion, notwithstanding the fact that it has 
been formally amended only eighteen times. 
Statesmen hke Webster, jurists like Mar- 
shall have almost as much claim as the mem- 
bers of the Constitutional Convention to be 
numbered among the fathers of the Con- 
stitution. 

There are important fields in which this 
development of the Constitution is still in 
process, as, for example, the power of the 
executive; but so thoroughly ingrained is 



140 THE VALIDITY OF 

respect for the Constitution and so effective 
are the various checks in government which 
it has embodied, that these elaborations of 
its principles by which the more complicated 
life of our day is brought within its jurisdic- 
tion will continue to be an expanding in- 
terpretation of its paragraphs. 

That there are dangers incident to this 
more or less surreptitious amending, or, if 
the word be preferred, expanding of the 
Constitution, cannot be denied. The rapid 
extension of federal powers by court de- 
cisions during the past quarter of a century 
has undoubtedly resulted from a belief that 
formal amendments to the same effect would 
have been impossible. Much of this new leg- 
islation springs from an entirely different 
conception of our federal government than 
that held by the makers of the Constitution. 
Some social reform — like the regulation of 
child labor, the maintenance of pure food, 
the protection of railway employees, the con- 
trol of railway charges, the curbing of com- 
mercialized vice — becomes a matter of gen- 
eral policy. Its efficiency depends upon a 
uniformity of provision impossible if sought 
in the legislation of the various States. Pub- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 141 

lie opinion demands nation-wide legislation. 
Congress passes the necessary laws and the 
Supreme Court finds them in accord with 
some clause of the Constitution broadly in- 
terpreted. Has such a process any limits? 
Would it not be more honest to amend the 
Constitution frankly giving Congress such 
powers? So it is occasionally argued and 
the argument is not to be ignored. But 
whether or not this new revision of the Con- 
stitution is strictly logical, even if in some 
measure it may seem to partake of national 
self-deception, it is the way American po- 
litical development is proceeding. And 
after all allowances have been made, it has 
in its favor the fact that it maintains caution 
and continuity. In its hght the charge that 
we are slaves to an outgrown document 
seems trivial. A constitution drawn as 
wisely as our own permits a conservative but 
constant adjustment of our democracy by 
progi-essive legislation to new social condi- 
tions. 

The second fact to be noted is that the 
amendments to the Constitution have always 
been in the interest of the extension of rights. 
No reactionary amendment has ever been 



142 THE VALIDITY OF 

adopted. The Constitution has shown itself 
capable of change by prescribed means just 
as soon as a general pubhc opinion has come 
to feel that new fundamental ideals have 
grown into national folkways. Thus slavery 
was abolished, suffrage has been extended, 
senators have been elected by public vote, 
an income tax has been permitted, the power 
of the liquor traffic to injure society has been 
restricted. Every one of these amendments 
represents a definite extension of fundamen- 
tal ideahsm upon which our national life is 
built. Not one of them looks toward the de- 
velopment of class consciousness or class con- 
trol. The welfare of the individual is para- 
mount. The fact that constitutional amend- 
ments do thus breed true to a fundamental 
purpose of democracy is a tremendous argu- 
ment for the vahdity, not only of the various 
provisions of the Constitution, but of the 
very conception of constitutionalism itself. 

There are no hmits to which these amend- 
ments can go provided only they are adopted 
according to constitutional methods. It is 
the method of amendment that is funda- 
mental, not the type of the amendment. If 
the constitutional number of the States 



AMERICAN IDEALS 143 

wishes to have an amendment establishing 
some different form of government — monar- 
chical, socialistic, communistic, or what not 
— there is nothing in the Constitution to pre- 
vent such amendments from being adopted 
and the government being changed. But an 
attempt to change the government in any 
other than constitutional ways is revolution. 
The Declaration of Independence expressly 
recognizes the right of revolution, but it 
does not undertake to say that revolution is 
constitutional. When certain extremists 
plead the constitutional right to freedom of 
speech to agitate a revolution they seem to 
me to lack a sense of humor. 

IV 

Thus it will appear that the Constitution 
is not something apart from democracy or 
individualism. It is one phase of what might 
be called a composite ideal. And so is it re- 
garded. The American respect for the Con- 
stitution is not bibliolatry, but is due to our 
belief that it embodies our conception as to 
what the state should be. And this ideal of a 
state so organized that it knows from a writ- 
ten document the limitations and powers of 



144 THE VALIDITY OF 

a representative government established for 
the purpose of guarding the freedom of indi- 
viduals, is guaranteed by two outstanding 
facts. 

First : It has made a permanent govern- 
ment. Notwithstanding the fact that the 
United States was an unprecedented ven- 
ture in politics, at the present time, with the 
exception of Great Britain and Turkey, its 
government is the oldest of all existing 
states. Such stability was not expected by 
observers in the eighteenth century. It 
seemed incredible that there should not arise 
in the United States as in older countries 
some family that would become royal. The 
likelihood of disintegration of the state and 
consequent collapse of anything hke govern- 
ment was argued from the fate of the gov- 
ernment erected under the Articles of Con- 
federation, and the tempting of political 
Providence by offering full citizenship to im- 
migrants. Since the barbarian invasion of 
the Roman Empire there has been no such 
mingling of nations as there is daily on the 
American continent. That in the face of 
these conditions stability of government 
should be so marked is a reassurance in a 



AMERICAN IDEALS 145 

period of transition like our own. As a na- 
tion, we have left undone those things that 
we ought to have done, and we have done 
those things that we ought not to have done, 
but there is health in us. 

Second : Testimony to the validity of our 
constitutional ideal is to be seen in world his- 
tory. The entire course of pohtical history 
since 1779 has been corroborative of the 
American constitutionalism. No sooner had 
this conception of a government under a con- 
stitution been realized on our shores than it 
became contagious. The history of the world 
since 1776 has been the record of the slow in- 
filtration of all politics with the American 
conception of the state as a free citizenship 
electing its governors in accordance with a 
constitution. It passed into France. Many 
liberal Frenchmen had fought in the Amer- 
ican Revolution. In the success of the 
American colonies they saw the possibility 
of establishing a French state in which the 
rights of men should be the basis of a con- 
stitutional government. And they brought 
to France this assurance of the success of 
democracy. 

England followed, and in the course of 



146 THE VALIDITY OF 

forty years Englishmen, with characteristic 
caution and their abihty to readjust privi- 
leges, passed the various Reform Bills, and, 
although they adopted no formal instrument 
of government, developed a democracy with 
the same basis as that of the United States 
— that is, a citizenship electing a responsible 
government. Of course the British have a 
king, but there are two Georges in England 
at the present time — the greatly loved 
George V and the son of a Welsh school- 
master, Lloyd George. It is the second 
George who is the active governor of the 
kingdom. 

This conception of a state based upon the 
rights of men, in which the administrators 
under the terms of a constitution are respon- 
sible to the people, colored the hope of 
Europe during the first half of the nine- 
teenth century. But except in Great Brit- 
ain and in France it was everywhere re- 
pressed. In Prussia, the conception of a 
state that recognized no power and right of 
citizens to express themselves in their own 
government was enforced by every type of 
censorship and proscription and mihtary 
power. The sinister influence in Europe for 



AMERICAN IDEALS 147 

thirty-five years after Napoleon was Metter- 
nich of Austria, and he looked at the govern- 
ment of England as one to be avoided by all 
the monarchs of Europe. Frederick Wil- 
liam III of Prussia followed in the wake of 
Austria. His people wanted a constitution, 
and they were promised it again and again. 
The people of southern Germany wanted 
constitutions, and they got them — Bavaria 
and Baden in 1818, Wurtemburg in 1819, 
Hesse-Darmstadt in 1819. Saxony gained 
a constitution so hberal that it became almost 
a "red kingdom," until Prussia forced Sax- 
ons to adopt a constitution of the Prussian 
sort. But Prussia stood like Gibraltar 
against constitutional government. When 
Frederick Wilham III died and his son, 
the affable Frederick Wilham IV, came to 
the throne, he refused to give a constitution, 
uttering words which sound strangely like 
some recently spoken, "Never will I let a 
sheet of written paper come hke a second 
Providence between our Lord God in 
heaven and the land, to govern us by its 
paragraphs." 

In 1848 a new wave of constitutionalism 
swept over Europe. It was the work of the 



148 THE VALIDITY OF 

grandchildren of the earher agitators, and 
it was stronger than that of the grandfathers. 
The revolution of 1848 in France expressed 
the undercurrent of the democracy that was 
working through all Europe. France has 
ever manfully sought to maintain its repub- 
lic. Governments have been pushed aside 
time and again by some coup d'etat; but in 
1848 this persistent loyalty to constitutional 
government expressed itself anew, and with 
greater powers. The king was thrust out 
and the new republic of France was estab- 
lished. A short-lived republic, to be sure, 
soon to go down at the hands of Napoleon 
III, but nevertheless, an illustration of the 
new spirit. The movement swept across 
Europe to Austria, and it dislodged Metter- 
nich himself, forcing him to flee to England 
and safety. 

You know the extension of constitutional 
government in the second half of the nine- 
teenth century: how nation after nation 
adopted written constitutions, and how in 
those constitutions, with ever-increasing em- 
phasis, the government was made responsible 
to the citizens. You can see this develop- 
ment in France, in the Scandinavian coun- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 149 

tries, in Belgium, Spain, Italy and Portu- 
gal, in Japan and China. In fact, the only 
great states that had not yielded to the im- 
pulse in 1914 were Prussia, Austria, Turkey, 
and Russia. To-day Turkey alone of these 
four nations is a monarchy. 

Democracy spread into Russia. In 
1815 at the Congress of Vienna, when the 
kings of Europe were gathered to dismember 
the Napoleonic conquests, the httle republic 
of Genoa was tossed off to some king. Its 
representative came to the Czar and pro- 
tested that a republic should not be so 
treated. The Czar said, "Repubhcs are no 
longer fashionable!" A hundred and two 
years later Russia said to the Czar, "Czars 
are no longer fashionable." The difference 
between those two statements is the measure 
of the influence of the American conception 
of the state as coextensive with citizenship, 
and of government as respons'ble to this 
citizenship, and of a constitution as the pro- 
tector of individual rights. 



150 THE VALIDITY OF 

LECTURE V 
COOPERATIVE SOVEREIGNTY 

The fourth ideal which has found expres- 
sion in the development of America has been 
that of a cooperative sovereignty. 

In history sovereignty has been far enough 
from being cooperative. Every nation has 
regarded itself as possessing not only the 
absolute power of administering its own af- 
fairs, maintain an army and navy, issue 
money and enforce its own laws, but the 
right to extend its control to other nations. 
Along with this power has existed a national 
pride peculiarly susceptible to injury and 
insult. Sovereignty in a nation has thus re- 
flected the sovereignty of the absolute king 
with his unrestrained power and supreme 
dignity. Beyond it there lay only God. The 
sovereign on earth was the visible expression 
of the Sovereign in heaven. 

The stormy rise of nationalities in the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries kept this 
conception of sovereignty always in the fore- 
ground. Unrestrained by any power su- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 151 

perior to itself, a nation was not a moral 
entity. It could do what it was able to do. 
War was almost continuous, for out from 
war came national expansion. Subjects of 
one sovereign were forced to become subjects 
of another. To question the right of a state 
to control its own subjects and attack its 
neighbors was to limit its sovereignty. To 
a considerable extent this conception still 
holds sway in the thoughts of legislators. 
Conditions which touch the sovereign honor 
of a nation are not regarded as justiciable. 
They lie beyond the range of treaties and are 
regarded as legitimate causes of war. 

But between the conceptions of sover- 
eignty universal in the seventeenth century 
and those of to-day lies a very real difference. 
Without any definite discussion of interna- 
tional morals, and certainly without any at- 
tempt to limit the right of any sovereign 
power to enter upon war on its own volition, 
there has grown up a belief that sovereignty 
must regard advantages which are superior 
to itself. Nations are beginning to think of 
humanity. To this change the United 
States has made important contributions. 



152 THE VALIDITY OF 



The ideal of America, albeit still imper- 
fect, that sovereignty can be cooperative as 
well as independent has sprung not from ab- 
stract politics but from national behavior. 
Incomplete though it may be, its life history 
is by no means brief. The establishment 
of the United Colonies of New England 
(1643) upon the basis of a formal agreement 
of Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, 
Massachusetts Bay to act together for the 
sake of protection against the Indians, is 
a sort of connecting link between the older 
conception of alliances and the later con- 
ception of sovereign states. In a sense it 
had already been forecast by the forming of 
little towns into independent colonies. A 
union of all the English colonies on the At- 
lantic seaboard seems never to have occurred 
to the original settlers. The first attempt to 
find some unity of action sprang from the 
need of establishing a common defense 
against the Six Indian Tribes. In 1754 the 
so-called Albany Conference was summoned 
with this end in view. At this conference 
Frankhn proposed a plan of union of the 



AMERICAN IDEALS 153 

northern colonies. According to this, each 
colony would give up its particular royal 
charter and join the others in something like 
a self -directive state under the suzerainty of 
the mother country. In a way it was a fore- 
cast of the present British Empire. It was 
to have a president appointed by the Crown, 
a Grand Council of delegates elected by the 
Colonial Assembly. Its legislation was to 
be subject to veto by the President and ap- 
proved by the Crown. The plan was imme- 
diately rejected by Connecticut because of 
this power of the veto and then by all the col- 
onies and the Crown itself. This interesting 
plan proved thus impracticable because of 
unreadiness to modify existing institutions. 

In 1765 the struggle of the colonies with 
the home government over the Stamp Tax 
led to the summoning in New York of an- 
other conference. This Stamp Act Con- 
gress was composed of twenty-eight dele- 
gates representing all the thirteen colonies 
except Virginia, North Carohna, and 
Georgia, although these colonies were not 
opposed to the plan. As it turned out, this 
Congress was a forerunner of the later co- 
operative actions of the colonies. The care- 



154 THE VALIDITY OF 

ful limitation of powers granted by the col- 
onies to their representatives is worthy of 
careful consideration by students of the 
American Constitution. They show very 
clearly the unwillingness of the colonies to 
delegate any of their limited powers to a 
representative body. As was expected, the 
Congress drew up petitions and memorials 
to Parliament, protesting against the Stamp 
Act. What was, however, of more impor- 
tance, it adopted a Declaration of Rights 
and Liberties which set forth sharply the 
colonies' view of their relations with the home 
government. But this Congress accom- 
plished little beyond giving expression to the 
growing sense of union among the colonies. 
The Stamp Act was repealed within a few 
months because it brought in no revenue, 
but this action of Parliament was accompa- 
nied by the statement that "Parliament has 
power to bind the colonies in all cases what- 
soever." This in turn served to hasten the 
coming of American independence. The 
next ten years were to show that the colonies 
were unwilling to admit any such hmitation 
of their powers. While they did not in 1765 
regard themselves as sovereign states, they 



AMERICAN IDEALS 155 

did regard themselves as having power of 
self-determination in regard to their own af- 
fairs. In fact, so independent did they ap- 
parently become that in 1769 Parliament 
undertook an investigation of what it re- 
garded as acts of treason committed in the 
colonies and sent troops to enforce its de- 
cisions. In 1773, the Virginia Assembly ap- 
pointed a Committee of Correspondence for 
communicating with the other colonies — an 
act which was followed by the other colonies. 
Within the same year Franklin again pro- 
posed a Congress for the colonies, and this 
time his plan was adopted by all the colonies 
except Georgia. On September 5, 1774, the 
first Continental Congress met at Philadel- 
phia and during the few weeks it was in ses- 
sion prepared an address to the King, me- 
morials to Great Britain and nonparticipat- 
ing colonies in America, drew up a Declara- 
tion of Rights and on October 20 established 
an American Association. This was in ef- 
fect an agreement to stop trade with Great 
Britain until the unsatisfactory acts had 
been repealed. When it adjourned it re- 
solved to meet the next year in case it had 
not gained its desired ends. Because of the 



156 THE VALIDITY OF 

attempt of the British to enforce the Acts, 
Massachusetts broke into rebelhon and war 
followed. 

The American Revolution clearly indi- 
cates how little sense of cooperation the col- 
onies had in their first experience of sover- 
eignty. The Continental Congress, indeed, 
continued throughout the entire period of 
the war, but it was possessed of practically 
no power to enforce its decisions. Each col- 
ony — or State — was sensitive to any outer 
control. After the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, July 4, 1776, on November 15, 
1777, the Congress adopted Articles of Con- 
federation and proposals of union between 
the thirteen States which then regarded 
themselves as independent and possessed of 
sovereign power. This union was called the 
United States of America, but its central 
idea was that of a confederation. There was 
no citizenship outside that of the various 
States. Treaties which were made with 
France were those of the united states, but 
the Continental Congress had no power to 
enforce their provisions upon the various 
States. Indeed, it was exceedingly diffi- 
cult to induce these States to engage in 



AMERICAN IDEALS 157 

any continued united effort for the war. The 
armies under Washington and the other gen- 
erals repeatedly disintegrated. It grew im- 
possible to raise money to pay the soldiers 
through requisition upon the States, since 
each State determined just how much finan- 
cial assistance it would give the United 
States. The treaty of peace between the 
United States and Great Britain, France, 
and Spain was a treaty with a Confederation 
that had no power to compel the action of the 
citizens of its component States. It could 
not establish a revenue by imposts. Its cur- 
rency became worthless, and the treaties 
were soon violated by various States. 

Four years after the close of the Revolu- 
tionary War the United States were on the 
verge of anarchy. There seemed to be no 
way of producing order. Sovereignty in the 
thirteen States was of the nature of the sov- 
ereignty of European states. Each was 
jealous of its fellows. The threatened col- 
lapse of order and the paralysis of govern- 
ment led to the formation of a new Constitu- 
tion, which should inaugurate a genuine 
union in place of a confederation. 

Even a superficial study of American 



158 THE VALIDITY OF 

popular opinion in 1789 will show how far 
the country was from any national unanim- 
ity of spirit. Each State claimed to have 
full sovereignty, and already quarrels were 
breaking out between them which threat- 
ened civil war. A monarchy was out of 
the question, and a confederation had been 
found impracticable. Thrust, therefore, into 
a condition which seemed even to the bravest 
patriot all but certain to result in anarchy, 
the little group of men who drew up the new 
Constitution undertook to build a federal 
government that should not deny sover- 
eignty to the States, yet should have a sov- 
ereignty of its own. This was accomplished 
by the novel device of delegating certain 
powers of each of the thirteen sovereign 
States to the new federal government, by 
making the citizens of the States citizens of 
the United States and by having the Consti- 
tution adopted by the people rather than by 
the legislators of the several States. It was 
thus a form of compact between citizens 
rather than between governments. 

Yet the original States persisted. Never 
by choice or the growth of precedent have 
they become mere departments of a unitary 



AMERICAN IDEALS 159 

state. Such a national structure as this in- 
volves puzzles citizens of highly centralized 
and departmentalized states like Japan and 
France. Yet in this local citizenship with 
its varied legislation lies no small element 
of our national strength. It conserves and 
expresses an intimate patriotism at once 
jealous of local rights and cooperative in na- 
tional affairs. 

For our Constitution fundamentally does 
not aim at overhead absolutism. The ideal 
it embodies is not that of political uniform- 
ity. By its very origin it aims at union, 
order, and cooperative efficiency. Its mak- 
ers had no theoretical interest in the prob- 
lems of government as such. They took the 
situation as they found it and made such 
changes and demanded such concessions as 
seemed imperative for the building up of a 
central government which should be capable 
of national defense, carrying on of foreign 
affairs, financing itself under certain definite 
limitations, maintaining public order, and is- 
suing money. These were the powers of a 
sovereign state, but they were delegated by 
the thirteen sovereign States to the Federal 
Government. 



160 THE VALIDITY OF 

So adventurous an undertaking carried in 
itself many unsettled questions as to the ex- 
tent of the sovereignty which had been left 
the original thirteen States. Old ideas per- 
sisted. In 1798 Virginia and Kentucky 
adopted resolutions to the effect that each 
State had the right to judge for itself just 
how far the acts of the federal government 
were binding. Fortunately, the occasion 
which gave rise to such a dangerous doctrine 
passed and the wisdom of the early admin- 
istrations and a number of exceedingly im- 
portant decisions of the Supreme Court soon 
made it apparent that the constitutional acts 
of the federal government were to be ac- 
cepted by the States and that no State was 
to pass legislation contrary to the congres- 
sional acts. 

But the question as to the extent of the 
sovereignty left in the possession of the 
States constituting the Union still remained. 
Nor did it compel a decision until the emer- 
gence of slavery as a sectional issue. Even 
then the right of a State to reassume its in- 
dependence either by nullification of the acts 
of Congress or by actual secession from the 
Union did not become a burning issue until 



AMERICAN IDEALS 161 

the expansion of the North made it plain 
that its political power in Congress would 
soon be greater than that of the South. The 
two sections of the country, which had been 
practically equal in population at the time 
of the adoption of the Constitution, were be- 
coming a majority and a minority. As long 
as the balance of power in the Senate was 
maintained by the admission of an equal 
number of slave and free States, the ques- 
tion of sovereignty was left in abeyance. 
When, however, the South became a mi- 
nority and feared anti-slavery legislation, it 
magnified the sovereignty of each State. 
Such a pohtical program had two serious de- 
fects. It refused to admit the Union as in- 
separable, and at the same time demanded 
that the Union protect the institutions of one 
State in all other States. This latter demand 
was necessary, since slavery was evidently 
doomed unless the entire nation supported it 
as among the rights enjoyed by certain of 
its component States. Paradoxically, States' 
rights, in order to maintain slavery, needed 
the support of the Union. It denied and yet 
demanded the cooperative sovereignty. 
Thus the economic and social theory 



162 THE VALIDITY OF 

which centered about slavery inevitably be- 
came constitutional propaganda. We are 
not altogether strangers to the issue, for we 
face a similar difficulty in enforcing the 
eighteenth amendment, but such a difficulty 
to-day does not involve geographical di- 
visions. The bitterness of constitutional 
struggles is not to-day solidified into eco- 
nomic areas. But in the early half of the 
nineteenth century the country faced a real 
issue as to the interpretation of our national 
life. For thirty years after the Missouri 
Compromise the maintenance of the Union 
was the supreme purpose of all statesmen. 
When the Southern social theory was com- 
pleted. States' rights was its one protection, 
the Union its great adversary. That the is- 
sue should have been settled by civil war was 
probably inevitable, for the two conceptions 
of a social order became politically incom- 
patible and antagonistic. The era of com- 
promise gave time for the marshaling of so- 
cial forces and material resources. History 
again gave the verdict. The Civil War not 
only determined that the wage system in- 
stead of slavery should be a phase of capital- 
ism, but it also determined that the United 



AMERICAN IDEALS 163 

States should be a nation with a national 
sovereignty instead of a confederacy with a 
group of local sovereignties; a nation with 
a national citizenship instead of a confed- 
eracy with local citizenship. The fall of 
slave-capitalism and States' rights meant the 
rise of a federal democracy. Sovereignty 
had at last been made cooperative. 

With the passage of the fourteenth 
amendment still further limitations were 
put upon the independent action of the 
various sovereign States. By it the federal 
government was given the power of prevent- 
ing the States from passing certain laws af- 
fecting their citizens. The efficiency of this 
new control has been to a considerable ex- 
tent negated by evasive legislation, but as a 
principle it is a part of the national struc- 
ture. Restriction has now supplemented co- 
operation. 

Yet the fundamental conception of the 
Union has not thereby been changed. Our 
federal government is still one of delegated 
powers formulated in the Constitution. Ex- 
tension of these powers is not the destruction 
of the principle. The ideal of cooperative 
sovereignty is preserved. 



164. THE VALIDITY OF, 

n 

The extent of the influence of this ideal 
of cooperative sovereignty has not been suf- 
ficiently appreciated. Like other aspects 
of the constitutional history of the United 
States, it has encouraged a new attitude of 
mind. It has served as a tension point for 
readjustments in international relations. It 
will be remembered that the colonists ex- 
tended the experience of their mother coun- 
try into the new political conditions de- 
manded by the building of a people in an all 
but empty continent. Similarly, the ex- 
perience of Americans in erecting a dele- 
gated sovereignty for the common good of 
sovereign States accustomed Americans to 
a recognition of the rights of other nations. 

Particularly is this true of the relations of 
the United States and Great Britain, a 
country which was contemporaneously mak- 
ing the same expansion of English consti- 
tutional experience. It is not so many years 
ago that we were about to celebrate the hun- 
dred years of peace between the two world 
powers. When, however, the time came, 
Europe was at war and we were neutral. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 165 

Lest, therefore, we should in some way vio- 
late this neutrahty, we curtailed the cele- 
bration of a world epoch to a few pageants 
and the reading of historical essays. It 
seems a pity that no larger attention was 
paid to this extraordinary fact. It might 
have served a very useful purpose in off- 
setting the anti-English propaganda of con- 
tinental Europeans and Irishmen. Even 
now it is worth consideration. For this cen- 
tury of peace was not a century of peace- 
ableness. The United States and Great 
Britain have quarreled over almost every 
subject about which other nations have 
fought. There is not a foot of our northern 
boundary line, not a codfish on the banks of 
Newfoundland, but has been submitted to 
arbitration. Yet we have not fought. Each 
nation through its experience in a develop- 
ing democracy has come to see that the 
rights of humanity are not antagonistic to 
the rights of sovereignty. Perhaps not al- 
ways graciously but always effectively, the 
two countries have yielded to a consideration 
of the rights of each other. 

Take, for example, our much discussed 
Monroe Doctrine. When President Monroe 



166 THE VALIDITY OF 

wrote his history-making message (1823), 
the reactionary forces of the continent of 
Europe had bound themselves, under pious 
verbiage, to prevent the extension of de- 
mocracy. They were planning not only the 
fixing of the peace of Europe but also the 
permanency of absolute monarchy. Accord- 
ing to the doctrine set forth in the Presi- 
dent's message: *'The American continents 
are not to be considered as subjects for fu- 
ture colonization by any European power 
and the extension of the program of the 
Holy Alliance to these continents would be 
viewed as the manifestation of an unfriendly 
disposition toward the United States." The 
more one considers this statement, the more 
audacious does it sound. In 1823 we had 
practically no army and a weak navy. Such 
a recognition of self-defense as involving the 
protection of other nations would have been 
hardly more than political bombast if it had 
not been for the fact that Great Britain took 
the declaration seriously and made it a basis 
for international friendship. The British 
fleet has been the great bulwark of the Mon- 
roe Doctrine. Self-interest undoubtedly 
was operative in both the American and the 



AMERICAN IDEALS 167 

British policies, but it is one thing to main- 
tain sovereignty and another thing at the 
same time to see that national safety is a 
good only as other nations are respected in 
their sovereignty. From the point of view 
of developing an international morality, that 
is the most significant thing in our Monroe 
Doctrine. We have never attempted to 
coerce the states to the south of us into 
union, but we have made it plain to the 
world that the Americas are to be treated 
not as isolated sovereignties but as a con- 
tinent. 

This spirit of subordinating national sen- 
sitiveness to international well-being ex- 
tended over the world. In 1915 the princi- 
ple of arbitration was expressed in two hun- 
dred and fifty-five arbitration treaties in ad- 
dition to those "bide-a-wee" treaties of Mr. 
Bryan. Of these arbitration treaties the cen- 
tral powers had made but seven and of these 
Germany had made but one. The others 
are between states who have had real or sup- 
posed experience in democracy. The United 
States has not gone as far in relying upon ar- 
bitration as some of us would like, but our 
sympathies and influence have grown con- 



168 THE VALIDITY OF 

stantly more pronounced in this regard. By 
our experience in cooperative sovereignty at 
home we have come to feel that war is a 
useless tragedy to be avoided. Such an at- 
titude of mind is bound to express itself 
still further in some form or other of inter- 
national cooperation. A sovereignty which 
insists exclusively upon its own rights is a 
breeder of war. Ten years ago this might 
have seemed hardly more than an abstract 
generalization. To-day it is a truth of su- 
preme value. We are now engaged in a uni- 
versal discussion as to how far the sovereign 
rights of a nation are compatible with co- 
operation with other nations. 

There are those that tell us that national- 
ism is something to be destroyed, that the 
proper unity of the race is to be found in the 
proletariat. There are others, especially old 
men, who insist that a nation must be self- 
sufficient and detached from the world to 
live. Of the two conceptions, the proletarian 
internationalism is a reform against history 
and human nature. National boundaries 
were never more subjects of passionate in- 
terest than to-day. As to a self -centered 
atomistic nationalism it is enough to say that 



AMERICAN IDEALS 169 

no nation nowadays can be detached from 
the world at large. However much one may 
regret that fact, it must be regarded as a 
datum of thought. No amount of voting on 
the part of our legislative bodies can restore 
the asylum once given by the Atlantic and 
the Pacific. You cannot put out a conflagra- 
tion by posting a sign to the effect that you 
dechne to share in the flames that come 
sweeping down the street. You cannot 
make yourself immune from smallpox by 
running a quarantine rope across your side- 
walk. We are a sovereign nation in the 
midst of sovereign nations, knit to them by 
commerce, subject to the social contagion of 
their ills. Any exercise of sovereignty that 
ignores these facts will be as futile as that 
which Napoleon attempted to exercise over 
the peoples of Central Europe. We tried 
assiduously to keep out of the Great War, 
but the world drew us into the maelstrom of 
its tragedy. The task of adjusting na- 
tional sovereignty to a world sohdarity is 
not a matter for phrase makers, impatient 
ideahsts, or selfish profiteers. It is for men 
who, like the fathers of our Constitution, 
dare face the already existing need of some 



170 THE VALIDITY OF 

sort of solidarity. The nineteenth century 
taught us that in our land the sovereignty of 
States must be made cooperative. The twen- 
tieth century will teach us the impossibility 
of any secession from world affairs or nulli- 
fication of world duties. The force of cir- 
cumstance is already compelling us. As the 
new continent forced us to expand our local 
ideals into national affairs, so a new world 
is forcing us to find some sort of adjustment 
by which nations can live together with 
peace. We want no superstate, but we do 
want and shall have codified cooperation 
among states that are sovereign. 

Partly because of our experience in the 
recognition of each other's rights, partly be- 
cause we have not been forced into fierce 
competition for territory, we have developed 
a creditable attitude toward weaker nations. 
Take, for example, the matter of indemnities. 
They have come to us from the necessity of 
cooperation with European nations in wars 
with weak nations. In 1868 we had a war 
with Japan. It was just when that country 
was beginning its new epoch, and the Japa- 
nese government, partly from weakness and 
partly from ignorance, had given offense to 



AMERICAN IDEALS 171 

certain European nations. The United 
States was obliged to cooperate in a war. 
We had no army in Japan, and no navy, but 
we hired a gunboat from the Dutch and went 
to war. When victory came after a few 
weeks, there also came the inevitable demand 
for indemnity. Our share of the loot was 
$800,000. It was paid over and put into 
the treasury of the United States, but it was 
never appropriated, and in 1883 the United 
States paid back the entire amount with in- 
terest. 

In 1898 there was the Boxer trouble in 
China. It was the attempt of a people in 
terror of subjection to alien powers to push 
the foreign influence out of China. China 
was in actual process of dismemberment at 
the hands of Russia, Great Britain, Ger- 
many, France, and Japan. The ambassa- 
dors of the various nations were besieged in 
Peking. An expeditionary force, composed 
of troops of the various nations, rescued the 
ambassadors and proceeded to inflict pun- 
ishment on the Chinese. When the uprising 
was over, an indemnity of 450,000,000 taels 
was laid on the country. Our share was 
something Hke $20,000,000. But again the 



172 THE VALIDITY OF 

United States refused the indemnity, and 
after having received a sum suflScient to 
make actual reparation for loss of property 
and lives, and the expense of the expedition, 
we told China to keep the balance, approxi- 
mately $10,000,000. The income from that 
sum is now being used to send Chinese youths 
to the United States for an education. And 
what is even more significant, we insisted 
that all nations should respect the integrity 
of China and maintain the open door to com- 
merce of all nations. The world stands 
pledged to that policy to-day. 

When we have been obliged to fight with 
other nations, we have paid rather than re- 
ceived indemnities. I have no desire to jus- 
tify the war with Mexico, although it has its 
valiant defenders, but I wish to remind you 
that if we did conquer Mexico, we paid her 
$15,000,000 for the practically uninhabited 
land which we annexed. Similarly in the 
case of the Philippines we paid Spain an in- 
demnity of $20,000,000 and then undertook 
to educate the Filipinos into a capacity for 
self-government. And we have kept our 
promises to the extent the welfare of the 
Phihppine Islands seems to warrant. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 173 

I do not mean to say there has not 
been arbitrary action in our deahngs with 
the Central American states and Haiti, but 
we have never looted these states nor an- 
nexed them. We have, rather, sought to as- 
sist them to stability of government and to 
protect them from the rapacity of European 
creditors. 

And then there is Mexico. Our refusal to 
intervene in Mexico, now so thoroughly jus- 
tified by the course of events, was a con- 
tinuation of our policy not to let our govern- 
ment be made a cat's-paw by commercial in- 
terests. The American soldier has never 
followed the concessionaire. President 
Wilson did something more than keep 
America out of war with Mexico. He 
showed the South American continent that 
the United States in applying its democracy 
to international affairs was not a big bully 
seeking to aggrandize itself at the expense 
of other nations. We have recognized sov- 
ereignty while protecting states. In so do- 
ing we have evolved a new conception of in- 
ternational relations. We have made them 
a source of helpfulness and cooperation 
rather than exploitation. 



174 THE VALIDITY OF 

Who can fail to be proud of a country that 
thus treats weaker nations! We have had 
our moments of shame and repentance, of 
ignominy and civil war, but our interna- 
tional behavior increasingly is developing the 
ideal that strong nations must recognize the 
rights of weak nations. As President Wil- 
son said, "A weak nation should enjoy self- 
government." That is not only an interna- 
tional evangel, but is another way of say- 
ing that sovereignty must be cooperative. 

The war we have just fought was one of 
self-defense, not merely for ourselves but 
for democracy as well. We fought to es- 
tablish a world in which peace should not be 
at the mercy of any autocracy, but one in 
which through the mutual recognition of 
each other's rights, nations should make it 
possible for men and women to live joyously 
so controlled by justice that social improve- 
ment shall go on to full fruition. In such a 
world small nations shall be no longer the 
prey of strong nations, and men and nations 
alike shall see that it is more blessed to give 
justice than fight for rights. That this great 
ideal is not yet realized is no ground for de- 
spair. Already it is asserting itself in vari- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 175 

ous forms.^ The British Empire is a group 
of cooperative sovereignties. The League 
of Nations is abeady in action. The Balkan 
States are forming alliances that promise 
some approach to common policies. Consti- 
tutionalism a century and a half ago was re- 
garded no less chimerical than this peaceful 
fellowship of nations looking to mutual ad- 
vantage and a common future. In the world 
as in America, sovereignty is yet to be co- 
operative rather than belligerent. 

* Since the delivery of these lectures there was held the 
Conference on Limitation of Armaments. It is another illus- 
tration of the new power of the ideal of cooperation among 
sovereign states. 



176 THE VALIDITY OF 

LECTURE VI 

AMERICANISM AS AN IDEAL 

We have thus far been considering ideals 
which are particularly associated with our 
national development. But these are by no 
means all that America represents. Amer- 
ica itself is an ideal. To attempt to define 
it, to analyze its elements is almost to destroy 
its power. In many an immigrant mind the 
United States is a synonym for the Golden 
Grail — a deliverance from all subjection, a 
pledge of peace and plenty. It requires no 
cynic to point out that the America of actual 
fact is something very different from this 
dream, and yet we should be immeasurably 
poorer if we were content to say the America 
of to-day is the true America of our hopes. 
We admit our crudities, our materialism, our 
bombastic patriotism and all those other evil 
qualities which the foreign observer so read- 
ily discovers. But we deny that the true 
America can be known fully from the exist- 
ing America. We look back across three cen- 
turies and see an uninhabited continent re- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 177 

ceiving a few thousand adventurous souls 
who sought to tame it into a home land. 
Across these centuries of development we 
chart our national development. If growth 
had stopped, if our present civilization were 
fastened on us, if the leaven of hope and 
creative zeal were not yet within our hearts, 
we might well feel America deserves the 
criticism to which she has of late been so 
pitilessly exposed. But still feeling the 
creative urge, still believing that America 
is in the making, we demand of our critics 
that they add this sense of the future to the 
present they find so unsatisfactory. For 
there still lies in our minds the promise of a 
better social order. The past with its rapid 
development is a promise of a future that 
shall also see development. America is still 
becoming. 

But what is it to become ? Is to-morrow to 
carry forward the curve of yesterday? Can 
these ideals which have proved their validity 
in our larger individual freedom, our de- 
mocracy, our Constitution, and our sense of 
international morality, still be trusted to be 
operative in the world which they have them- 
selves begotten? Or will they become merely 



178 THE VALIDITY OF 

like the glowing pictures of their youth and 
maturity drawn by the aged? 

The temptation is to answer such ques- 
tions affirmatively or negatively in accord- 
ance with one's own prejudices and hopes. 
To the new intellectuals intent upon the im- 
perfections of our social order and the un- 
willingness of men to adopt radical reform, 
the only answer seems one of despair. The 
America which they see is sordid, filled with 
grafters, profiteers, petty politicians, enor- 
mous aggregations of wealth which hold the 
masses in subjection, a land without creative 
imagination, poets, arts, Uterature, music — 
a land in which our Puritan inheritance pre- 
vents the development of beauty and con- 
ventions restrict artistic self-expression. On 
the other hand, to those who have succeeded 
and who have shared in the better hf e of the 
country, the future seems to herald only a 
steady increase of comfortable homes, op- 
portunities for wealth, the "triumphant de- 
mocracy" which Mr. Carnegie preached. 

A sober appraisal of the situation, how- 
ever, will lead to no unqualified reply. As 
we look into our national life we need to ask 
whether these ideals which have been con- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 179 

struct! ve in the past are still elements in our 
social mind, and if so, whether readjust- 
ments of life are now proceeding, which 
make them still as potent as in the past. In 
other words, despite the diflBculty of any con- 
temporary estimate, we ask ourselves just 
what are the creative forces of our own 
America? The answer will be found not in 
programs, but in Americans. 



Mr. Edward Bok, in his interesting and 
illuminating autobiography, describes his 
fifty years of life in America as a process of 
Americanization. He very truly says, and 
in this he is supported by Lord Bryce, that 
the approach to a proper understanding of 
America is not through its capacity to make 
money, but through its idealism. Yet after 
an experience of the actual process of be- 
ing transformed from an immigrant to one 
of the most significant characters of our day, 
Mr. Bok goes on to say that the process 
showed him that Americans were indiffer- 
ent to thrift, failed to honor thoroughness in 
the performance of any task, neglected the 
education of children of foreigners even 



180 THE VALIDITY OF 

though furnishing them with public schools, 
have too little respect for law and authority, 
and utterly fail to instruct the new voter in 
the significance of what Americanism really 
is. That is a serious indictment, all the more 
serious because drawn from wide observa- 
tion. And it raises the fundamental ques- 
tion as to what Americanism really is. Have 
we as a people any distinguishing character- 
istics? What is it to be an American? 

It certainly is not simply to be an inhab- 
itant of America. Unfortunately, there are 
too many persons, by no means to be limited 
to immigrants, who live in America, who are 
even citizens of the commonwealth, who are 
indifferent to the hopes, the lives, the creative 
ideals which have made it a nation. 

It is not to be an Anglo-Saxon. Rooted 
as our institutions are in Enghsh history, 
America is not a second edition of England. 
We are an English-speaking country, but 
we are not an English people. We are 
Americans. This seems sometimes very con- 
fusing to the people of the mother land. On 
the one hand, they want to think of us as 
Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, as a 
recent English writer has said, one must dis- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 181 

possess one's "mind of the idea that there is 
an American people at all, as we understand 
a people in Europe. To be a people is the 
dominant ideal of Americans, an ideal which 
they claim with all appropriate fierceness to 
have realized, knowing all the while that they 
have done nothing of this sort, and that their 
only hope of doing anything of the kind is 
to do away with their present social system 
and then wait five centuries for events to de- 
velop." But this is to use the term "people" 
in an ethnic sense. 

That we have our own personality is the 
view of Miinsterberg and McDougall. 
These trained observers from abroad assert 
that an American people exists and that al- 
most universally Americans possess the 
same characteristics. Their list of such uni- 
fying characteristics is worth considering: 
"a spirit of self -direction and self-confidence, 
of independence and initiative of a degree 
unknown elsewhere, a marvelous optimism 
or hopefulness in private and pubhc affairs, 
a great seriousness tinged with religion, a 
humorousness, an interest in the welfare of 
society, a high degree of self-respect, and a 
pride and confidence in the present and still 



182 THE VALIDITY OF 

more in the future of the nation; an intense 
activity and a great desire for self -improve- 
ment, a truly democratic spirit which re- 
gards all men (or rather, all white men) as 
essentially or potentially equal, and a com- 
plete intolerance of caste." 

A careful consideration of this description, 
as well as our own observation, will show 
that in our character there are elements 
which are not necessarily ideal. Indeed, 
some of them are liable to become anti-ideal. 
They are not necessarily vulgar or immoral, 
but they are quahties of personality which 
make the operation of the highest motives of 
the past difficult. 

Initiative, for instance, is not necessarily 
an ideal. Certainly Americans possess it. 
The capacity to think quickly and act almost 
before one thinks, is universally recognized 
as an American trait. If there is one word 
our American vocabulary despises it is 
manana. "Do it Now" is the motto hanging 
above the desks of thousands of business 
men. To this capacity for prompt activity, 
which waits not for commands but for op- 
portunity, no small share of American ac- 
complishment is due. But initiative is not 



AMERICAN IDEALS 183 

idealism. It may become hardly more than 
the restlessness of a people who even when 
tired sit in rocking chairs. Even at its best 
it may be rapacious rather than humane, un- 
scrupulous rather than regardful of human 
rights. To be really creative, the power of 
initiative must be consecrated to projects of 
permanency, plans for the distant future, in- 
stitutions making for personal welfare. 

Nor is efficiency always friendly to ideals. 
To be able to accompUsh results as well as 
to initiate plans, to standardize effort in such 
accomphshment, to reduce waste to a mini- 
mum, is just now one of the great slogans 
of progress. We live in the midst of ma- 
chine-made wealth and we naturally esti- 
mate humanity by the standards of a ma- 
chine. Avocations as distinct from vocations 
seem unworthy of practical minds. Culture 
most men leave to their wives or to persons 
whom they can hire to lecture or write books. 
We have banished the study of the classics 
until the student of Greek is getting to be as 
rare as the student of Hebrew. The "movie" 
has reduced acting to obeying directions 
shouted through a director's megaphone. 
Classical drama is played by those who can 



184 THE VALIDITY OF 

replenish their income by portraying the 
eternal triangle. The best-paid class of lit- 
erary workers to-day is undoubtedly the ad- 
vertisement writers. 

I am not belittling efficiency. I suppose 
all academic people have a suppressed envy 
of men of affairs, but efficiency undirected 
by the thought of service to human welfare 
becomes a veritable tyrant of materialism. 
We fought a war to protect a democracy 
from efficiency- worship. We certainly must 
not blind ourselves to the belief that a power 
to do things is an end in itself. The true end 
of efficiency is doing things of value to the 
human spirit. I know of few more pathetic 
representatives of success than men who can 
talk of nothing except business and mar- 
kets. If we are to become merely an efficient 
nation, we shall be a pitiful nation. For what 
shall it profit a nation to gain the entire gold 
supply of the world and furnish the raw ma- 
terials for civilization if it shall lose its own 
soul? Men used to portray hell as a place 
where men burned forever. It might also be 
described as a place where men, regardless 
of the true value of personality, everlastingly 
seek to become more efficient. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 185 

Closely allied to the worship of efficiency 
is the elevation of wealth to the practical end 
of activity and the standard of success. 
Though it is conventional to lament money- 
getting, I would not appear to join the 
chorus of those who indiscriminately con- 
demn wealth. There is a struggle for wealth 
which does not debilitate moral health. Our 
country abounds in men who, without injur- 
ing others, because of foresight, power of 
organization, and self-denial have accumu- 
lated fortunes. To my mind it would be a 
misfortune if such opportunity should be 
closed. Along with wealth has come the 
means for culture. Poor peoples have little 
art. 

But one does not need to be hypercritical 
of social life to see that the dominance of 
economic motives deadens all others. A 
great people cannot be built on wealth alone, 
or even upon the ambition, energy, and op- 
timism which the opportunity to get wealth 
evokes. A rich nation may become a heart- 
less, selfish nation, unwilling to mingle in 
the struggle for human betterment, building 
itself a house by the side of some interna- 
tional road and watching the struggling peo- 



186 THE VALIDITY OF 

pies pass by. The views of the financier in 
politics are too seldom marked by a zeal for 
generosity and helpfulness. Charity is not 
identical with justice. The search for wealth 
too often breeds indifference to human wel- 
fare, an estimate of men and women as mere 
economic factors in social life, a fear of so- 
cial change, a struggle for control over 
others. 

In none of these characteristics of Amer- 
icans does Americanism as an ideal lie. 

II 

Americanization is the process of develop- 
ing attitudes in individuals. It is more than 
teaching people to speak English, important 
as that may be. It is more important even 
than giving them citizenship. That too is 
important, but to dilute our citizenship with 
men and women who are not truly in sym- 
pathy with our ideals of government is a 
questionable policy. A democracy like ours 
cannot be composed of ill-disposed or unin- 
telligent persons. A selective process is im- 
perative. The tests made by the govern- 
ment during the Great War show an alarm- 
ingly large number of citizens who are pos- 



AMERICAN IDEALS 187 

sessed of inferior minds. Even if these 
tests fail to disclose the possibihty of im- 
proving such minds, they make it evident 
that any increased proportion of inferior hu- 
man material bodes evil for the republic. An 
intelligent nation must have an intelUgent 
citizenship. The American people until re- 
cently has drawn from the most virile of the 
Europeans. It cannot hope to maintain its 
character if composed of unintelligent 
voters. 

To make Americans is to bring men and 
women under the influence of our institu- 
tions and ideals, to instruct them as to their 
meaning. Even more does it demand that 
individual citizens become possessed of an 
attitude of mind which is sympathetic with 
American ideals, and ready to make them an 
object of conscious loyalty. Beneath our 
general political ideals lie those of the in- 
dividuals composing the nation. These 
foundation attitudes involve the following 
elements, which have been the leaven of the 
national idealism which has made America 
what it is and must be relied upon to make 
it what it should become. 

1, Social responsibilities must be recog- 



188 THE VALIDITY OF 

nized as the correlate of liberty. The indi- 
vidual who looks to America simply as a 
place where he is released from pohce con- 
trol and left free to satisfy his own desires, 
has certainly failed to grasp the significance 
of our country. By its very development 
America has taught people to bear one an- 
other's burdens, as well as to cast off those 
placed on their shoulders by irresponsible 
monarchs. The perfect law of liberty is co- 
operation in the giving of justice. The most 
imperfect law of liberty is to demand that 
other people recognize you as a brother, 
while to you brotherhood becomes an oppor- 
tunity to acquire something from your 
brothers. 

2. Law must be respected as law while 
at the same time subject to legal change. A 
democracy in which individuals disregard the 
public will is impossible. Given human na- 
ture as it is, there must be some way of ex- 
pressing group authority. To disregard law 
is to disintegrate social life. No person who 
sets himself above the law has any license to 
live in a nation like ours. American indi- 
vidualism, as we have already seen, is not an- 
archy. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 189 

3. The agents of public opinion must be 
free. In a democracy discussion is impera- 
tive. We cannot expect the pubhc press to 
be impartial, even if such a miracle were de- 
sirable. We ought, however, to be protected 
against the manipulation of facts by those 
who have ulterior motives for such manipu- 
lation. The only limits to be set upon free- 
dom of speech and the press should be the 
preaching of revolution and the violation of 
the fundamental moralities and decencies of 
life. 

4. A respect for personality as the final 
good in life must be recognized as indispen- 
sable for carrying forward social and eco- 
nomic adjustments. Nothing can take the 
place of this attitude. To weaken it is to 
weaken the whole structure of our American 
life. A democracy founded upon economic 
processes alone is doomed. It could not sur- 
vive its own success. A democracy is made 
of democrats, not wealth. 

5. Public education must be in the hands 
of those who believe in Americanism and do 
not further ethnic or religious segregation 
for the purpose of developing an anti-demo- 
cratic attitude of mind. This is not to say 



190 THE VALIDITY OF 

that there should be no parochial schools, but 
it is to insist that the nation should see that 
such schools as truly as the public schools do 
not become disintegrating influences in our 
American life. 

6. While it is impossible to expect that an 
entire society shall be composed of highly 
moral men, religion and morals must help 
form our social mind. Such moral qualities 
as we have seen impUed by the development 
of our American life can be grounded ulti- 
mately only in religion. This, of course, is 
not to say that the state is to be subject to a 
church, but, rather, to insist that a belliger- 
ent, materiahstic social mind promises either 
constant disorders, if not revolution, or dras- 
tic control by the state. The churches of 
America have a great service to render in 
giving youth its fundamental bent toward 
respect for the will of God, immanent in na- 
ture and regulative in society. If world- 
history of the last fifty years means any- 
thing, an attempt to transform existing 
authorities and to set up popular liberty 
without the inhibitions and encouragements 
of religious faith, means disintegration of 
pubHc and private morals. A turbulent 



AMERICAN IDEALS 191 

proletariat or a reactionary bourgeoisie is no 
substitute for a God of law. 

Now, the morality of a world centering 
about individuals and that of a world center- 
ing around classes is likely to be very differ- 
ent. Liberty in the former case will be sub- 
ject to an experience in self -direction ; lib- 
erty in the second case will be almost in- 
variably a rebellion against all authority. 
Illustrations of these principles can be found 
anywhere one looks. A sincere American 
looks with no small concern upon a plea for 
liberty unrestrained by a regard for morals. 
I am not referring to that pose which over- 
takes adolescent youth and finds expression 
in a willingness to cheapen all respect for 
conventions. Greenwich Village will be out- 
grown by persons who really have in them- 
selves any specific gravity of character, 

I have in mind a much more serious mat- 
ter, namely, the presence in our society of 
numbers of young people who find in Amer- 
ica no restraint in the form of customs, law, 
or conventions. To such young anarchists 
parents are negligible quantities except as 
providers of rooms, food, and clothes, and 
America is not a vision or a common task. 



192 THE VALIDITY OF 

They are like barrels which have lost their 
hoops. They are not becoming American- 
ized but desociaiized. 

Such persons need to be taught that 
America is no social vacuum, that license is 
not liberty, and that the lessons which Amer- 
ica has learned in the past are not to be over- 
looked. We need to make an entire genera- 
tion feel that pleasure-seeking and wealth- 
getting, whether they be by way of capital- 
ism or by way of socialism, are not the mean- 
ing of America. 

7. The imperfections of the present must 
suggest and inspire the betterment of the 
future. To publish evils is not always to 
promise reform. Discontent becomes con- 
structive only when it is joined by hopeful- 
ness. The actual then is seen to be tem- 
poral; that which is not seen but which can 
be brought to pass, becomes the true reality. 
Restlessness under inequitable conditions 
has always been a factor in Americanism. 
But it has been creative rather than pessi- 
mistic. When Americans lose this resilient 
confidence in their future, America will have 
grown senile. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 193 

III 

Such ideals as these cannot exist among 
unintelligent democrats. This is made plain 
by the fact which has already appeared, that 
America moves forward by mass instinct and 
feeling rather than in response to hereditary 
leadership. If this mass movement is not 
permeated with intelligent morality, if pub- 
lic opinion is httle more than public preju- 
dice and passion, it is quite impossible for 
Americans to carry on effectively the Amer- 
ica they have inherited. Only individuals 
of loyal sympathy with our national and per- 
sonal ideals can carry on the adventure of 
developing Americanism. Such a develop- 
ment, it must needs be repeated, is more than 
the reproduction of the past. Relatively 
speaking, the constructive elements of our 
past were homogeneous. To-day they are 
drawn from almost every nation on the earth. 
These elements are historically alien to each 
other, surcharged with national hatreds. In 
America they cannot be destroyed. They 
must be combined. No other people has 
faced a similar task since the days of the bar- 
barian conquest of the Roman Empire. Can 



194 THE VALIDITY OF 

we hope to produce a true Americanism from 
these varied elements? 

The process of carrying forward the ideals 
which we have had bequeathed us, which, as 
we have seen, have sprung from the highest 
ranges of practical experience, is often de- 
scribed as that of a melting pot. Of course 
figures of speech are not to be taken too se- 
riously, but the presupposition which lies 
back of the figure of the melting pot is one 
to be seriously questioned. If our sketch of 
the development of the American spirit is 
correct, it is obvious that the very genius of 
our nation has been one of combination and 
adjustment. While we have been regardful 
of the past we have always felt that new oc- 
casions teach new duties. This is the very 
heart of our democracy. To maintain in- 
definitely every accomplishment of the past 
would mean a sort of tyranny to which no 
one of us would submit. The process of 
Americanization can much better be de- 
scribed, in the words of President Faunce, 
as a process of cross-fertilization. Various 
national groups contribute their customs and 
their attitudes to a process which would be 
different if it were not for their contribution. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 195 

Or, to change the figure, the American ideals 
are the warp upon which we must weave the 
various colored threads of other national cul- 
tures until we produce the rich tapestry of 
the future America. To this end we must 
give up the idea of thinking that American- 
ization means the production of colonial New 
Englanders, Southerners, or Calif ornians. 
To attempt such reproduction would be po- 
litical and social atavism. 

If this process, in the midst of which we 
are now involved, is not to be a f oreignization 
of America rather than an Americanization 
of foreigners, we must deliberately undertake 
to initiate all our citizens and prospective 
citizens into a knowledge and understand- 
ing of genuinely American institutions. I 
have been surprised and rather alarmed at 
the ignorance which otherwise apparently 
intelhgent Americans show as regards our 
political structure and purpose. I wonder 
how many graduates of our colleges could 
offhand teU the difference between the con- 
ception of constitutional government in 
America and in other countries. How far 
do they understand the place of the Consti- 
tution in determining the consistent and yet 



196 THE VALIDITY OF 

cautious expansion of political experience 
into reform and amendment ? How many of 
them could tell the actual process by which 
the United States estabUshed inspection of 
meats, control of railroads, the assurance of 
pure food? How many Americans who use 
the word "democracy" really think of it as 
it actually is — a method of government in 
the interests of individual liberty by repre- 
sentatives of the sovereign people? If we 
should find difficulty in answering such ele- 
mentary questions as these, how can we ex- 
pect to develop the genuine spirit of America 
among those who come from countries where 
the class rather than the individual is su- 
preme, where democracy means socialism, 
where nationalism is regarded as a capital- 
istic device and reUgion is held to be a scheme 
of terror and reward by which the ignorant 
are kept content in economic subjection? 
The answer will lie in an educational process 
interpreted in its widest sense. 

Our public school system is here of pri- 
mary importance. That it can become a 
source of intelligent appreciation of Amer- 
ica is beyond question. But we have not yet 
clearly seen how this is to be accompHshed. 



AMERICAN IDEALS 197 

Just at present our educational experts seem 
to be obsessed with the idea of preparation 
for vocation ; schools are to be places where 
one learns how to make a living. It would 
be foolish to overlook the importance of this 
element in education, but quite as important 
is it that we seize the opportunity furnished 
by the schools for a sympathetic exposition 
of what America has done and what it is 
trying to do. Nothing is simpler than to 
point out what it has not done. Anyone can 
see the fly specks on an old master. Our 
schools should be conducted the country over 
by really intelligent teachers rather than, as 
in so many cases, by young women who re- 
gard teaching as a sort of economic inter- 
regnum between school and marriage. Only 
thus can our schools be of influence in pre- 
serving the real American ideals and hopes. 
To put educational processes into the hands 
of those who are hostile to American ideals 
is to threaten our future. Education is a 
public trust. We would not make our teach- 
ers the mouthpiece of chauvinism, but even 
less can we permit our schools to be indiffer- 
ent to our national mission. The salute to 
the flag, the pledge of loyalty to the pupils' 



198 THE VALIDITY OF 

country, the instruction in elementary poli- 
tics, the interpretation of our history, the 
insistence upon our democracy of free indi- 
viduals, all are indispensable for the evoking 
of a proper loyalty to the nation. How great 
an influence our educational system has been 
in the production of a healthy Americanism 
none can fully estimate. To disregard its 
office to-day is farthest possible from our 
purpose. 

But our new citizenship has its own con- 
tribution to make to Americanization. 
Every community should utilize the cultural 
elements which foreign groups furnish. 
Nothing is more reprehensible than the at- 
titude which many smug native-born Amer- 
icans take toward the foreigners who have 
drifted into their community. No one who 
has ever seen pageantry work of schools in 
the Jewish quarters, who has listened to the 
music furnished by Hungarians, Italians, 
Bohemians, and other European peoples, 
can maintain any arrogant sense of superi- 
ority in claiming Anglo-Saxon descent. I 
have been in touch with thousands of young 
men as they passed through college, and I 
doubt if one per cent could play a tune on 



AMERICAN IDEALS 199 

the piano, write a strain of music, or enjoy a 
symphony concert. It is no mere accident 
that our musicians seldom have Anglo-Saxon 
names. They are Americans, but they rep- 
resent the contribution which other than the 
Anglo-Saxon strain is making to the Amer- 
icanization process. The same is true in 
other cultural fields. 

The real process of binding the various 
elements of American life together into a 
growing nation must needs be spiritual as 
well as poHtical and economic. We have al- 
ready called attention to the fact that our 
democracy has not tended to develop classes 
and has never regarded Americanism as in- 
compatible with the maintenance of group in- 
terests of varied sorts. It is therefore a fair 
question as to how expedient is indiscrimi- 
nate assault upon the nationalistic elements. 
Living as I do in the midst of these great 
groups, I can see that they possess a common 
loyalty and pride in America which is su- 
perior to ethnic grouping. But when an at- 
tempt is made to change a hyphenated 
American of one sort into a hyphenated 
American of another, a protective emphasis 
is laid upon ethnic feeling. A Bohemian 



200 THE VALIDITY OF 

American, for example, objects to being an 
Anglo-Saxon American as truly as an An- 
glo-Saxon American would object to be 
made into a Bohemian American. Nor is it 
any reply to say that America historically 
is Anglo-Saxon. The simple fact is that 
whatever Americanism may have been in 
1787, at the present time it is not Anglo- 
Saxon. Our devotion to the ideals which 
our country embodies is something quite 
other than a loyalty to them as Anglo-Saxon 
ideals. I am proud to know that they have 
back of them the experience of England, but 
they are mine whatever their origin, because 
they are American. 

American idealism cannot be hyphenated. 
It can be claimed by men of all descents be- 
cause it is not the property of any strictly 
ethnic group. We are a new people in the 
making. We should not permit the pohtical 
issues of Europe to determine the attitudes 
and patriotism of ethnic groups in American 
policy and politics. 

I know the objections raised to this point 
of view, on the part of those who think that 
no persons can be American unless they are 
of their own particular type. My reply to 



AMERICAN IDEALS 201 

such position is twofold. First, that a man 
who holds such a position simply does not 
know America. He is provincial and anti- 
American. And, second, our idealism is a 
hope and not an accomplishment. America 
of the eighteenth century was a creature of 
hope. The America west of the AUeghenies 
is still a creature of hope. I have traveled 
hundreds of thousands of miles over the con- 
tinent. I have met all classes of men and 
women, and I am convinced that despite eco- 
nomic discontent, one might almost say 
sometimes because of economic discontent, 
the American people beheves it has a future 
greater and more significant than its past. 
But this hopefulness is not that of the stock 
broker or of the banker. It is that of men 
and women who produce the raw materials 
of our wealth. You cannot understand it by 
listening to the complaints of the farmers, 
the oration of the labor leader, or the lamen- 
tations of the men who have to pay surtaxes 
on income. You will find it as a great cur- 
rent of conviction running beneath all sur- 
face disturbances. To these people who can- 
not forget the prairie which they or their 
fathers made into fields, America means 



202 THE VALIDITY OF 

something very different from a space in 
which to make a living. Only when people 
are crowded up against the Atlantic do they 
seem to think less of America's accomplish- 
ments and more of its faults. 

IV 

Thus far I have been speaking as an 
American from the point of view of our own 
America. If we step outside the circle and 
look upon ourselves through the eyes of 
Europe and Asia, would it be true that such 
an interpretation of American spirit and 
life as I have attempted to give would be 
found in other minds ? Any answer to such 
a question is of course unreliable. No man, 
least of all a foreigner, can hope to speak 
as representative of the countless milhons 
who fill the continents. But if we can judge 
from the literature which is being published, 
and from the various approaches which are 
being made to the United States, it would 
appear that two contradictory judgments 
are to be found. On the one side are those 
who, feehng the pressure of the circum- 
stances resulting from the war, are eager to 
flee to the United States, there to enjoy 



AMERICAN IDEALS 203 

peace and prosperity. On the other hand 
are those who see in the United States the 
embodiment of selfishness, isolation, and re- 
fusal to assume a share of the world's misery. 

It is not hard to account for this double 
interpretation of our national life. On the 
one side America does possess the advan- 
tages which the immigrant seeks; on the 
other side we have refused to get under the 
burden of the world's misery, except in so 
far as we have contributed freely of our sub- 
stance for the relief of human need. The 
bitter thing in the latter interpretation is 
the fact that we have monopolized the pros- 
perity of the world. Unless it be possibly 
Japan, no country has come forth so un- 
scathed from the war. We know little of 
famine, poverty, death, when our experi- 
ences are compared with those of England 
or France, or Italy, not to mention the hid- 
eous tragedy of Russia and Armenia. 

And yet, as we look at Europe and the de- 
mands which it makes upon the United 
States, it is hard to avoid the impression that 
much of the criticism which is thrown upon 
us is born of our refusal to undertake to do 
things which the European nations prefer 



204 THE VALIDITY OF 

to have us do rather than do themselves. We 
frankly refuse to engage in any political 
unity. We are not altogether sure of eco- 
nomic solidarity for fear lest there may be 
concealed behind bank balances some po- 
litical alhance or secret treaty. I think we 
shall have to bear the criticism both just and 
unjust of these Europeans who fail to un- 
derstand our actual attitude, and who are 
impatient because we are refusing political 
fellowship. Some of us are not proud of our 
refusal to enter the League of Nations but 
we cannot see in that decision an utter aban- 
donment of our determination to follow 
ideals. Foreign entanglements have always, 
and fortunately, been our hete noir. In the 
long run it may prove to the world's advan- 
tage that a powerful nation has refused to 
underwrite continental bankrupts or assume 
mandates over nations caught between the 
commercial rivalries of Great Britain and 
France. We face a mighty task of our own. 
If we fail, the world will drink the very dregs 
of the cup of sorrow. 

Far more serious than the question of how 
Europe judges us is that as to how far our 
development can be continued in the midst 



AMERICAN IDEALS 205 

of a world where there is such agony, 
tragedy, and disorder as we see in Europe. 
It is idle to think that any experience akin 
to that of American development will be fur- 
nished by immigration. If our immigrants 
came in any considerable number from Eng- 
land, the outlook would be different. But 
the immigrants whom we are to receive will 
come from oppressed peoples without ex- 
perience in self-government, and whose ig- 
norance of our American life, fashions, and 
institutions will increase our problems. 
New elements of discontent will spring 
from the disappointment men feel when 
they find the nation they have idealized into 
an impossible heaven, is a place where men 
must earn their living, and where economic 
conditions have not yet found full self -regu- 
lation. But such problems are calls to action 
rather than complaints. We must be strong 
if we are to help the world. And we must 
help because we are strong. 

V 

The magnitude of this responsibility 
which we face as a nation should appeal par- 
ticularly to students in college. There, if 



206 THE VALIDITY OF 

anywhere, should be found men and women 
who have an inteUigent grasp of the real 
meaning of America. No class more thor- 
oughly enjoys the advantages of our social 
order than do college students. They should 
go out by the hundreds of thousands into our 
national life with the distinct ambition to 
carry on the work of the fathers. 

It is, I fear, too much to expect that all 
these hundreds of thousands of young per- 
sons will devote themselves with any passion 
to national development. But there will al- 
ways be a vicarious tenth distributed over 
our great land. Theirs above all others is the 
possibility of projecting our national ideals 
into the reconstructive efforts in which we 
are engaged. If college graduates fail to 
heed the call of this supreme moment in 
civilization to devote themselves whole- 
heartedly to the spread of justice, the main- 
tenance of personal liberty, the extension of 
democracy in accordance with the great prin- 
ciples contained in our Constitution ; if they 
fail to realize the responsibility America 
already faces in international affairs; we 
may well despair of our country. But if 
they in any considerable number devote 



AMERICAN IDEALS 207 

themselves to the highest type of citizenship 
and refuse to coarsen their patriotism, our 
nation may have a large share in one of the 
great creative epochs of history. 

We of the older generation are bequeath- 
ing youth a country in which we have tried 
to express our noblest hopes. We pass it 
over proudly as a heritage which, with all its 
imperfections and its inequities, is one which 
no generation should be ashamed to accept. 

The next quarter of a century will see our 
nation pivotal in world history. Already 
it is becoming perhaps the greatest factor 
in the hopes of the world. To be loyal to its 
history as it extends into new conditions, to 
respect its institutions, its laws, and, above 
all, to cherish its great ideals of liberty, per- 
sonality, and democracy is to insure that the 
America of to-morrow will serve its day as 
the America of the past has served the past 
and is serving the present. And our service 
will be that demanded by a world that has 
all but lost its hopes and faiths — the mainte- 
nance of our idealism at home and the con- 
secration of our resources and experience to 
the furthering of justice and well being 
throughout the world. 



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